


Needs Context

by orangecrushcrushcrush



Category: League of Legends
Genre: Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Reader-Insert, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-13
Updated: 2021-02-08
Packaged: 2021-03-03 01:39:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 36,948
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24166735
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orangecrushcrushcrush/pseuds/orangecrushcrushcrush
Summary: The hole in the ground isn’t in a place you’d ever expect a hole to be. Sure, pavements have manholes, and grassy fields have trenches, but no flat surface just has a giant, clean, completely pitch-black hole. It just doesn’t happen. Ask anyone with even a bit of common sense and they’d agree with you. It’s too bad you have no one to ask, and it’s too bad no one’s there to see you trip and go face-first into it.---This is a series of oneshots featuring different characters x isekai'd readers that will be mostly slice of life/pwp! ∠( ᐛ 」∠)＿
Relationships: Khada Jhin/Reader, Master Yi (League of Legends)/Reader, Sett (League of Legends)/Reader, Shieda Kayn/Reader, Sylas (League of Legends)/Reader, Twisted Fate/Reader, Yone (League of Legends)/Reader, Zed (League of Legends)/Reader
Comments: 581
Kudos: 417





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> wow this actually exists now 
> 
> a big thank you to the people on twitter who voted so I didn't have to choose which character to write LMAO

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Characters that have been requested:  
> \- Swain  
> \- Singed  
> \- ~~Yone~~  
>  \- Shaco  
> \- Ezreal  
> \- Samira  
> \- Yasuo
> 
> Feel free to +1 a request!

The hole in the ground isn’t in a place you’d ever expect a hole to be. Sure, pavements have manholes, and grassy fields have trenches, but no flat surface just has a giant, clean, completely pitch-black hole. It just doesn’t happen. Ask anyone with even a bit of common sense and they’d agree with you. It’s too bad you have no one to ask, and it’s too bad no one’s there to see you trip and go face-first into it. 

You don’t even have time to react, because suddenly the regular scenery you’re used to is replaced with nothing but blackness and a giant rush of wind, and you’re not too sure, but this looks a lot like it’s going to be the very last thing you feel- when suddenly it’s not. You land on something, somewhere, but your eyes still don’t focus and your breath has still been sucked away by the wind, and before you know it you’re in...well. You’re not too sure about that, either.

\---

Choose-your-own- ~~adventure~~ league character from the chapters! IF/WHEN THERE ARE MORE CHAPTERS 


	2. Sylas

Before you can catch your breath (or balance), even before the bright spots in your eyes fade away, someone grabs you, drags you down what sounds like a stone hallway, and tosses you unceremoniously into a prison cell. You try to ask questions, but the guards outside the cell refuse to answer, complaining among themselves instead about how the "summoning failed" and that you have "no discernable skill at all" and also look "pathetically weak". 

You try not to feel too insulted, but honestly it's kind of hard to do after being kidnapped, thrown into what looks like a medieval prison, and then being apparently so much of a failure in life that even your kidnappers are disappointed.

You look around instead, trying to find a distraction from your own shortcomings. A horribly stereotypical medieval prison cell, in what appears to be an equally stereotypical medieval dungeon, in the basement of what you can only assume is a stereotypical medieval castle. The sudden urge to start breaking things in search of coins and potions is overwhelming.

Unfortunately (fortunately?), no such breakable objects exist in your little jail cell. All you have is a wooden pallet, some ominous shackles bolted to the wall, and a tray of...food? It looks like bread and an apple. You reach out to drag it closer-

_ Pling. _

A burst of light. Something odd and blurry...wait. You know this. Every RPG you’ve ever played has this, and honestly, given your circumstances you’re not even too surprised at the fact that a holographic inventory system suddenly appeared before your very eyes (okay, the fact that your inventory has so little space is surprising, but you suppose it just really brings home that whole “pathetically weak” thing). 

No better time than the present to test it out. What can it hold? The wooden pallet? The shackles?  _ The world? _ You drag the entire pallet around the cell for a good couple of minutes, and then try to yank the metal chains off the wall, but no matter what you do neither object magically de-materialises and pops into your inventory box. 

A hard knock against the metal bars of your cell. “Stop that racket!”

Apparently your guards haven’t left yet, and also are probably starting to question your sanity. Fine. What about something smaller? You pick up the apple, look at the empty inventory slot, and…

_ Pling. _

“Hah!” you say, because now you have an actual thing in your inventory, have proven the existence of this RPG mechanic in whatever strangely-detailed hallucination this is, and it’s probably only a matter of time before you can start breaking vases and opening other people’s cupboards and collecting in-game currency-

The bars rattle.  _ “Shut up!” _

If they didn’t want to deal with having to take care of a prisoner, maybe they shouldn’t have kidnapped someone, but who are you to give advice? You’re the one stuck in the jail cell. You eat the remaining chunk of bread while the two guards outside take what appears to be the medieval equivalent of a smoke break, and try to eavesdrop to figure out what the hell is actually going on.

Something something summoning. Something something magic is bad. Something something summon an otherworldly being to  _ kill all the mages, holy shit, you walked right into a witchhunt.  _ You really, really hope you’re not the thing they summoned to apparently wipe out all witches from the face of the earth, because you’ve spent the entirety of your life kind of enjoying not being a murderer, and you’d rather not start now. 

Nope. Judging from the angry looks they’re throwing your way, you were definitely that thing, and they clearly feel cheated. Your teachers did say you never lived up to your full potential. 

“Maybe we should just kill her,” one says, completely unfazed by your scandalized expression.  _ Wow.  _ This is a whole new level of buyer’s remorse. 

“Blindly following your masters orders, eh?” says a completely different voice, so far away you can hardly hear it.

“Shut up, prisoner,” hisses the other guard, and what do you know? Apparently you’re not alone down here. You’re still trying to decide if that raises or lowers your chance of survival when the guards leave your cell, walk closer to the other voice, and start hurling insults and death-threats at it. Classy. 

All this talk about  _ purging  _ and  _ cleansing  _ and  _ brutally murdering an entire subsect of the population  _ has made you rather light-headed. You focus, and your inventory swims back into your line of sight. Now might be a good time to eat that apple, sweet things have always come in handy in times of stress...

It’s not coming out. Why isn’t it coming out. 

You jab at the slot, trying to will the fruit back into your hands, but no matter what you do, the little apple icon just sits there, and really you don’t need this level of frustration in your life-

_ Skill slot locked _ , says a line of tiny, barely-legible line of text just above it, and you try very hard not to hyperventilate.

\---

It takes you so long to regulate your breathing that the guards have wandered off by the time you regain some semblance of sanity. Then you remember that what you thought was an inventory is actually your skill list, and also that your only skill is  _ apple _ . 

It takes just a little longer to bring your breathing back to normal again. 

When you open your eyes, there’s another tray by the door of your cell, filled with what looks like soup this time. At least they’re feeding you. This time you’re not stupid enough to do something like make your second skill  _ soup _ , so you reach over and lift the bowl up to drink it down like a normal person.

“Wouldn’t do that if I were you. It’s probably poisoned,” says the faint voice, and you, ever rational and clear-headed in the face of danger, jerk your hand away and spill the soup all over your clothes instead. 

_ Pling. _ You close your eyes. You’re getting really tired of plings, and if you open your eyes again and there’s a little soup icon in your second skill slot, you will pry those metal chains off the wall and choke yourself to death with them. 

_ Poison Apple _ , says the  _ apple  _ icon, the icon that’s now glowing and looking all-too-enticing. Well then. What’s the harm in trying it out?

You reach out and tap on it, and instantly a jet of scalding hot, bright green liquid shoots out right towards where your finger is pointing. There is no time to recoil in shock, or think about what would have happened if you were, say, pointing at yourself, because the jet of liquid splatters against the metal bars- and with hardly a sound, corrodes right through them like the bars were made of paper. 

Maybe poison was a typo. Maybe the gods of this world saw  _ poison _ , picked  _ acid _ , and went “eh, close enough”. And sure, if you knew that you could do something like this just by thinking about poison, you would have thought a lot less about  _ poison apple _ and a lot more about  _ machine gun apple _ , or  _ portal back to my world apple _ , but what’s done is done, and it is at the very least a useful skill. 

"What the bloody hell?" comes that same faint voice, now sounding even fainter with disbelief. You can sympathise. 

A little more poison apple, a little more unnervingly caustic liquid, and you’ve cut a giant, cartoonishly round hole through the metal bars of your cell. Now would be a good time to escape. A great time, in fact, before the guards get back and you’re forced to discover if that unnervingly caustic liquid also cuts cartoon holes through people. You step through the gap in the bars, and as your eyes get a little more adjusted to the dim, flickering light, you finally see who it is you’ve been listening to all this time. 

If that’s what a long stint in this prison does to you, you have to get out, like  _ right now. _ The man chained up in the cell a little distance from you looks like he could kill a guard with his bare hands. Or teeth. Or both, probably both. 

“I’m not going to  _ murder you,” _ he says, because apparently you have nothing even close to a poker face. “Not much I can do with these on.” 

You suppose those giant chains do look a little restrictive. And now that you think about it, he did save you from poison soup (maybe?), so you kind of owe him one. He recoils when you point in the direction of his cell, until the bars melt away and he realizes you’re not actually going to acid him to death. 

Bars melt away, chains melt away (from where they were bolted to the wall, because you don’t trust your aim anywhere closer to his very burnable flesh), and before you know it your fellow prisoner is on his feet, stretching and acting like the two massive chunks of stone and metal around his wrists don’t weigh him down in the slightest. You consider the chances of him using his newfound freedom to murder you (bare hands, teeth) and move back. Just a bit. 

“You’re an odd one,” says the man wearing nothing but chains and a denim onesie. The nerve. 

“What are you in for?” you say, trying to sound like someone who’s accustomed to prison, and therefore not worthy of being brutally murdered with hands and/or teeth. 

“Magic,” he says, and oh.  _ Oh. _ He’s a witch, one of those witches the people here so badly want to murder, and if they get back and find out you helped him escape, they’ll probably want to murder you too, won’t they? The likelihood of you having to burn acid holes through people keeps getting higher and higher, and even considering the state you’re in, you’d still rather not do that. Yes, all things considered, now would be the perfect time to get as far away from this place as you possibly can.

“Where’s your broom?” you ask, peering around. 

“My what?”

“Your witch broom,” you say, but his face doesn’t show any more comprehension than before. 

“Your flying contraption?” you try, waving your hands in a zooming kind of way. 

Nothing. Perhaps even less comprehension than before. Maybe it’s best to start from the beginning. 

“You’re a witch, right?” 

“I wouldn’t call myself a wit-”

“So you can do magic, right?”

“Actually, what I do is detect and  _ channel _ mag-”

“So you have a magic spell that can get us out of here,  _ right?” _ you say, hands clutching at the air, only now considering that instead of a murderer you have in fact freed a large, denim-clad burden. 

“I might not have  _ spells,”  _ he says, but before he can say anything else, your conversation is rudely interrupted. By the spear now firmly embedded in the wall. 

“The prisoners escaped!” screams the guard, who apparently carries both spear  _ and  _ sword at all times, swinging said sword menacingly in your direction.

“Die, witch!” He cries, looking  _ absolutely  _ ready to stab you, and honestly at this point, you’re done. You give up on your ideals of not harming another human being, and instead create new ideals, ideals that are starting to involve ceaseless and uncaring homicide. You’re still trying to calculate exactly how many guards your acid can burn a hole through when your companion leaps forward, swings his chains forward like two battering rams, and promptly knocks the guard unconscious. 

_ Oh. _ It still isn’t a flying spell, but you suppose punching really well counts as magic of its own.

“As I was saying,” he continues, tossing the guard to one side like he weighs just about nothing, “I’m sure I can be of assistance in other ways.”

You clap politely. He looks rather pleased. 

Your shared moment of pleasantry is broken by distant shouts, and the clattering of swords and shields. You try to find an escape route, but the only exit is up the stairs, and those stairs currently have what sounds like an entire stampede of people coming down them. You start to have doubts about exactly how many guards you can burn a hole through in one go- wait. 

The walls can’t be  _ that  _ thick if a spear could get stuck in them, right? You wouldn’t have to acid moving targets if you could just acid the  _ wall.  _ It’s worth trying, and so you ready yourself, take aim, and start spewing acid like a broken firehose.    


It is not the most flattering of skills, but it’s certainly effective. The wall slowly melts away, revealing...even more wall. Fantastic. Never in your life did you think to look up things like _ average thickness of castle walls in the middle ages,  _ and boy are you paying for it now, but there’s no time to think of another strategy. You keep going, and the wall keeps melting away bit by bit, and suddenly you can see what looks like the faintest hint of sunlight.

“Hurry it up!” urges your companion, and you turn around to tell the ingrate that you are  _ trying, thanks very much _ , when suddenly the room is spinning. You don’t remember turning around that fast, and you really don’t remember the floor being so close to your face. It suddenly occurs to you that magic spells in games, much like the spell you were using so generously up until a second ago, use up mana. Perhaps it might have been prudent to check how much mana you actually had before assuming you could release the equivalent of a swimming pool’s worth of acid, but what’s done is done, you gave it your best shot, and you suppose it’s only a matter of time before the guards find you and stick you with their swords like a kebab.

A large hand picks you up, and suddenly you’re lifted off the ground and moving  _ very _ quickly towards the bit of wall that’s left, and this can’t be going where you think it’s going-

Yep. Smashed through the wall. Just punched right through it, all the while towing you along like a sack of rice. You’d clap if you weren’t so dizzy. Debris crashes down around you, the shouts of the guards behind growing fainter and fainter- then the light is suddenly  _ so bright, _ and you feel so lightheaded you can’t really see anything at all anymore. 

\---

The ramshackle hut you wake up in isn't much of an aesthetic improvement, but the lack of guards with stabby swords and exceedingly outdated religious outlooks makes it worlds above your jail cell.

“How are you feeling?” someone says, and you turn around to get a clear and unfettered view of your fellow escapee propped up against the far wall, eating what looks like...trash. Yeah. He’s eating trash. You suppose dumpster diving is a hobby that spans multiple universes. Still, you can’t be too judgemental. Prison life does things to you, and by the looks of it he’s been in there for years. You wave in what you hope is an accurate conveyance of gratitude for taking you with him when he smashed through that wall. 

“My pleasure,” he says, tossing the crumpled wrapper of...something...into the corner of the room. 

“So, uh,” you say. “What’s your name?”

“Sylas,” he says, and then, at no prompting from you, launches into an entire speech about mages and magic detection and  _ spending his entire youth blind to the hypocrisy of the ruling class.  _ Jesus. You just asked for his name. 

Something in your expression (The unblinking stare? The gaping mouth?) makes him pause halfway through his marxist-esque monologue. 

“Uh,” he says. “Didn’t mean to go on like that. I didn’t really talk to anyone besides my handler, so...you know.”

You don’t know. What the fuck. _ Handlers?  _ Actually, maybe you  _ will  _ hear the rest of that life story. Who needs reality TV? You nod at him supportively,, and just with that bit of encouragement he’s off again, telling you literally his entire life story. And what a story it is. 

“So tell me again- your parents did what now?” you say, squinting, after what seems like a good hour and a half of letting him ramble on.

“I had magical abilities, so-”

“So they snitched on you?!” Holy shit, he got sold off, then accidentally killed his handler with magic, and then sent to prison _ again. _ No wonder he’s grown into a feral hobo. There was no other option, really, all things considered.

“Do you really have to go on about that whole hobo thing?” he says, which is a funny thing to hear coming from a man who, mere moments ago, was eating what looked like literal trash.

“So what’re you going to do now?” you ask, obligingly changing the subject, and definitely not looking at the pile of half-eaten garbage in the corner. 

He shrugs. “Topple the ruling elite? Bring down the bourgeoisie who’ve persecuted our people for so long? I’m joking,” he says, because again, you have literally zero ability to keep a straight face. “Sort of.”

Fantastic. Your new friend has only one goal in life, and it’s to go full Les Misérables, and we all know how well that ended for those kids-

“Les...what?” he says, reminding you once again how foreign of a land you’re in, where no one understands pop culture references and people still want to do things like _ burn witches.  _

“I don’t expect you to help,” he says, but with the whole sold-as-a-kid-into-years-of-imprisonment thing, he suddenly seems a lot less like a crazy homeless person and a lot more like an overgrown kid with a horrible childhood and literally no friends. And what else are you going to do? He  _ did  _ punch his way through a wall to help you out. 

“I could help,” you say, and even though that help probably involves way, way more physical effort and grievous injury than you would have ever liked to experience in your life, for just a second he looks so happy that you can almost believe it’ll be worth it.

\---

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> DO YOU HEAR THE PEOPLE SING


	3. Sylas | Epilogue (E)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> it has been
> 
> SEVEN!!!! MONTHS!!!!
> 
> since this fic was updated AND IT IS STILL THE LATEST SYLAS/READER FIC ᶦ ʷᵉᵉᵖ ᶠᵒʳ ᵐʸ ⁿᶦᶜʰᵉ ᶠᵃⁿᵈᵒᵐ, so I wanted to just finish it up with his epilogue and get that sweet sweet E rating

Helping him apparently means that you spend a lot of time breaking in and out of the city, stealing supplies and making maps and plans and generally cementing your role as a full-fledged criminal.

You really hope he’s thought this whole “toppling the monarchy” thing through. Of course he has. Hasn’t he?

“What do you mean, what happens after the revolution?” he says.

\---

You panic, try to break into the city library, and realize that _there is no city library._

\---

“What are you doing?!” he says, as you grab his piles of stolen maps and diagrams and crazy-person plans and start scrawling over them with charcoal.

_“School.”_

\---

You spend months teaching him as much as you can remember, and it is the first time in your life you wish you’d paid more attention in class. Math. Science. And that one thing you never thought you’d have a use for in your life ever- history. 

Revolutions. Military coups. Debts and constitutions and republics. The mere fact that the story doesn’t end with a “happily ever after” once the ruling class is dead seems to be something he hasn’t even considered. You clutch your head, and for the first time, imagine what hell your teachers must have had to go through. 

\---

To his credit, he’s a much better student than you ever were, especially considering his lousy excuse of a teacher. He listens. He learns. And he even stops making those awful, rambling speeches about _overthrowing the corrupt nobility who sit, fat and indulgent upon their thrones, a festering wound that poisons the very fabric of this city-_

He blinks. “Sorry. Did I go off again?”

Well. He does try. 

\---

Now that he’s put his plans for revolution on hold, your lives fall into a somewhat more peaceful routine. _He_ may not be able to make a living off his incredible power to punch things really hard with magic, but _you_ have face-melting, rock-dissolving acid, and that can be useful in so many ways. 

“Yes, the lands around the kingdom are rich in minerals. Why do you ask?” he says.

\---

It turns out that there is, just as you suspected, a demand for gold ore and raw gemstone, and now you don’t have to watch him casually stuff literal garbage into his mouth anymore.

\---

Sometimes he wakes up, if not quite screaming, definitely in enough of a panic to make you bolt awake; confused and ready to spray acid at the nearest living person. 

“Just a bad dream,” he says, shrugging it off. “Don’t worry about it.”

But he is your friend, and so you worry about it. 

\---

There have been many things in his unfortunate life that could give him nightmares, but once you narrow down the options (‘still alive’, ‘most traumatic’ and ‘not related to overthrowing the monarchy’), it’s easy enough to figure out that he, or at least his subconscious, hasn’t fully given up on the idea of getting revenge. And honestly, if you were in his shoes, you would have probably gone on a murderous rampage much sooner, so there is really only one thing that you, his friend, need to do to help him.

“By the way,” you say casually. “Do you remember who put you in prison in the first place?”

The ensuing monologue is just as long and just as dramatic as ever, but this time you listen. 

\---

He looks a little concerned when you say you’ll be gone overnight, but what’s he going to do? Someone whose face is plastered all over the city’s bounty boards should stay hidden like a good fugitive.

The mage-killing, inquisition people are easy enough to find - all you had to do was break into the castle and start spraying acid. Sure, it’s not the most elegant of tactics, and sure, all the ominous, dark-robed people look exactly the same to you, but does it matter? You can just bring back, like, five bloody robes, and his subconscious will think _yay, revenge complete,_ and you will never have to wake up thinking that someone’s trying to break into your house again.

You plow through the first few, and when you melt through their defenses with the power of _bright green acid,_ the weaker-willed members of the group just turn and flee- taking their robes with them. Damn it. You have to keep _something_ for a souvenir, and your brain is quickly moving on from ‘robes’ to ‘limbs’. 

Then one of them chants something, and a bolt of something magic smacks you in the arm, slicing through flesh and sending you reeling and _oh my god, these hypocrites are using magic._

They move closer, forming a tight circle. You suppose _they_ think they can beat you down with the power of teamwork, but _you_ have the power of endless vindictiveness, and if a few more magic punches to the face means they’ll get close enough for you to melt them all into a puddle of goo, _so be it._ They keep sending their weird zappity magic at you, and you just take it in the face like one of those punching bag clowns, because soon enough they’ll be within arm’s reach, and then you can _liquefy them into the ground and dance on their nonexistent corpses._

A yell. A nearby scream. Before you can, in fact, liquefy and dance on said corpses, the circle is broken—specifically by someone grabbing as many of them as he can and throwing them against the walls. 

You're not sure what he's doing here, or why he had to ruin your masterful plan, but you see the look on his face and decide it's best not to argue. 

\---

_“Have you lost your mind,”_ he says, doing...an honestly incredible job of bandaging you up. You suppose you can learn things in prison after all. Also, you were just trying to help him get revenge, and if he’d turned up just a minute later, you could have _both_ done some corpse-dancing. 

“Revenge doesn’t matter,” he says, shaking you like a sack of flour. “I don’t need it if it ends with you dead!” 

Oh. That's actually very sweet. Maybe you overreacted, maybe you didn't actually need to celebrate atop the fallen bodies of your enemies, but you can't tell him because he's still shaking you, and then suddenly he's dragged you into a bone-crushing hug. 

"Mgh," you say, because he's really squeezing those wounds he just helped bandage up, but it hits you that considering he was imprisoned for so long, maybe you are his first real friend, and maybe the idea of you dying would be something he'd rather not think about. 

"Sorry," you say, returning the hug as best you can with him still squeezing the life out of you. He sighs, burying his face into your hair for just a second before pulling away. 

You reach up to cup his face with your hand. 

"Sorry," you say again, and he turns his face, pressing a kiss into your palm for a split second before reeling back. 

Uh. You didn't expect that. The both of you stare at each other, and he starts to babble some excuse, but-

"I don't mind?" you say. No, that sounded like a question, and he's clearly ready to fling himself across the room if you don't push. 

"I don't mind," you say again, and lean over. 

For someone who looks like a hardened criminal and throws out expositions like he's one of the revolutionaries in Les Mis, he kisses with absolutely no confidence. He has no idea how to angle his head, and he's so stiff it feels like if you push him a bit more, he'll just snap in half. To be fair, all his revenge plotting probably didn't end with him _fucking_ the enemy, so maybe he hasn't really given it much thought. 

You lean forward, a bit more, pushing him until he's backed up against the wall, and crawl into his lap. It’s like sitting on a wooden chair. You tap his cheek, tilting it enough that you can deepen the kiss a little, licking into his mouth. 

With a groan, he seems to come back to himself, bringing his hands up from where they’ve been clenched at his sides so that he can-

“Ow,” you say. You can only take one crushing hug every twenty-four hours. 

“Sorry,” he says, but a too-tight hug is still better than having him sitting there like a stone carving, so you pull his hands back around your waist and draw yourself up so you can kiss his forehead, his cheek, the curve of his jaw. 

He curls over you so he can kiss you again, his hands sliding up underneath your shirt. You have no problem getting this thing (whatever this is) going for real, and after prying his hands off for a second, manage to wrangle his shirt up and over his head. 

You run your hands over and down his chest, feeling the criss-cross of scars that cover the expanse of skin. He groans when you move lower, sliding your fingers along the inner seam on his pants, tugging his belt off so it’s just a little more comfortable and you don’t have _two_ things poking you when you sit back down. 

“Doesn’t seem quite fair,” he says, trailing kisses down your neck, and, well, he’s free to take off your clothes if his dumb, nervous statue hands can manage it. 

Apparently they can. There’s something to be said for sex as a motivating factor. 

The moment he can get his hands back on your skin, they’re everywhere- brushing back your hair, skimming over your sides, fingers pressing into your thighs. His mouth always seems to be occupied, murmuring something in your ear or kissing the side of your neck or running his tongue over the delicate skin below your collarbone. One hand moves up, cupping your breast, running a calloused thumb over the sensitive skin, repeating the movement over and over again when you arch into it. 

You angle yourself carefully and grind down against the bulge of his dick, using friction to your advantage. His movements stutter, and then he’s cursing and sliding one hand down between your thighs, rubbing carefully until your breath hitches and your muscles tense, and you forget all about doing anything at all. He repeats his careful movements until his hand is slick, and you’re out of breath just keeping yourself upright, watching you the whole time like this is something new and amazing- and it’s nice that he’s so enthusiastic about this, but if he keeps this up you will just come right there, and there’s no fun in that. 

“Hold on,” you say, reaching down. He groans when you pull his dick free, already leaking in your hand. You brace yourself on your knees, but when you try to sink down he moves, suddenly, cushioning your head with one hand and tipping you back until you’re flat on the floor. 

“I,” he says uncertainly. “I wanted to do this somewhere nicer-”

What does he want? A hotel? A castle? The throne upon which the king himself sits, moments after deposing him, as the people sing outside and wave their banners in revolutionary fervor? No wonder he hasn’t gotten any. 

“Here is _fine,”_ you say, and pull him down for a kiss. 

When he pushes in, it’s slow and careful, but you use your heel to nudge him until he’s bottomed out inside you. He watches you as he moves, looking for the right angle, the right speed, and you both appreciate and regret the fact that he is, apparently in many ways, a good student. 

“Does it hurt,” he says, pressing his lips to your forehead, and then “Say _something,”_ as he pulls back to check. 

No. It does not hurt. In fact, if he stops now, you will forever hold this against him and the two of you will never do this again. It’s only too bad you somehow don’t have enough air in your lungs to tell him that. 

Miraculously, he seems to get the message anyway. He grins, and leans back down, pulling one of your legs over his arm, hitting you at an angle that makes you bite your lip and clutch at his shoulders for support. The friction builds, heat coiling in your stomach, and you come with a gasp, clinging on to him like your life depends on it. 

He pulls you up, supporting your weight as he pounds into you for a few more seconds. His grip becomes almost painful, and you tilt your head up to kiss him as he comes, arms wrapped around you as if he’s afraid you’ll disappear if he lets go. 

\---

“I didn’t mean,” he says, and when faced with your unblinking stare, “I did mean- but I didn’t...uh. Did I go too fast?”

“No,” you say, trying to figure out if there’s a magic spell for running water. Or a shower. Or modern-day plumbing. “Are there any countries with hot springs?”

“I feel like the two of us are having different conversations,” he says. 

“Not really,” you say, and “I like you a lot,” and it’s kind of endearing how quickly he leans over to kiss you.

\---

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if anyone stumbles across this, thanks so much for reading!! I hope you enjoyed it!


	4. Master Yi

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> YALL ON TWITTER 
> 
> I GAVE U FOUR OPTIONS AND YOU PICKED MASTER YI 
> 
> MASTER YI
> 
> I CREATED A BRAND NEW YI/READER TAG FOR THIS

The first thing you feel is the soft grass against your face, and the first thing you see are mountains. Lush, green, rolling mountains, foggy forests, and in the distance a winding river, looking like a travel advertisement and more serene than any scenery you've ever seen. 

If only there was someone around to share it with. 

\---

It takes you awhile to figure out that you're not going to get things like cell reception or GPS here - you're not sure where you are, but if you're ever going to find out, you'll need to get to civilization. You look around, picking up a fallen branch as a walking stick; and this is your second clue that you're no longer in the world you knew, because the moment you pick it up, it starts glowing. 

\---

A glowing stick is both more useful and less useful than you expected. It lights the way at night, and it supports your balance like a walking stick should, but that's it. No amount of ‘wildly waving it about’ transforms it into a sword. No amount of ‘yelling spells and pointing at the air’ changes it into a magic wand. 

But in the end, a glowing stick is better than a non-glowing stick, and so you keep it with you as you walk. And walk. And walk. 

It's the dawn of the third day, and you're seriously considering the fact that you might have to live the Bear Grylls lifestyle for the foreseeable future when you finally spot something in the distance - smoke; making a thin, white line as it winds its way up into the sky. Smoke, and smoke means fire, and fire means _civilization._

You grip your glowing stick and start running. 

\---

It’s not quite the town you pictured. You expected a campsite, or maybe a small town, or some kind of road trip rest stop. Instead, the village you come to looks like it came straight out of an ancient Asian painting. 

"Do you need help?" says a mildly alarmed villager, in perfect English. You clutch the stick even tighter. 

\---

The villager guides you into a large, wooden compound in the center of the village, and very thoughtfully gets you some tea, but looks confounded when you ask him things like _could I please use your phone_ and _is there wi-fi here_ and _would you direct me to the nearest airport._

The village head, a kindly-looking old man with the patience of a saint, tries his best to answer your questions, but you can tell by the look on his face that he thinks you're more than a little odd, which right now is apparently the only constant between your world and this one. 

On the plus side, he welcomes you to stay as long as you want. On the downside...well.

“In the _dojo?”_

“There’s no other free space,” says the village elder, and the man crosses his arms, sighing. You try not to feel too offended. He looks exactly like what you’d expect from someone who runs a dojo - serious, stern, and honestly not a lot of fun. You try to be optimistic- they're letting you stay here for free, and it probably won’t be so bad. You could use a vacation. Cottagecore is a thing, right?

\---

“Boil the water if you want a hot bath.” 

“Oil lamps are expensive. Read in the daytime.”

“For the last time, _I don’t know what a washing machine is.”_

He turns abruptly and walks off, not answering any more of your questions because he has _things to do_ and _students to teach_ and _no more time to waste on a person who can’t even perform the basic necessities of daily life._

You make all the rude gestures you can remember behind his turned back.

_“I can see you.”_

_Of course he can._

\---

“The swordmaster isn't so bad,” says one of his students, sitting down beside you on the stone bench. Of course she’d say that. He’d probably cut her head off with a sword if she didn’t.

“I miss electricity,” you say. She pats your back encouragingly, even though you know she has no idea what you’re saying. You tell her about things like shower heaters, and air conditioning, and lights that stay on through the night so you don’t have to wake up with the sunrise to get anything done. 

“We have lights here too,” she says. 

No. They have oil lamps. You pick up your glowing stick, which for some reason no longer glows, and draw a crude, rudimentary picture of a flashlight in the dry dirt, trying to explain it to her. 

The stick glows. 

\---

You hold the flashlight in your hands, clicking it on and off and trying not to pass out from shock.

\---

The next few days are a blur of meetings with the village elder and endless, terrible drawings. 

You figure out that you don’t actually need the stick - it doesn’t matter what you use, as long as you can draw on the ground. It doesn’t even matter how well you draw it, as long as you have a clear picture in your head. Sure, you can’t make anything oversized (goodbye, washing machine), but anything small and familiar to you pops out of the ground like...well, like magic. Sure, they only last a day before fading away, but you can manufacture what seems like an endless amount of items without even breaking a sweat.

You clutch the walking stick (You have become familiar with it. It is your friend. You might give it googly eyes) in your hands, and try not to get too carried away. You have common sense. You are a fully functional adult-

“Don’t get too carried away. You have no common sense. It’s a miracle how you’ve stayed alive until now,” says the dojo master, glaring at you. 

You draw fifteen different porn magazines and hand them out to all his students.

\---

The village doesn’t go through any drastic changes, because your creations only last a day. But now they have hot baths. They have lights. And they have _entertainment._

 _“This is not entertainment,”_ he says, clutching fifteen confiscated magazines. Maybe to him, because he probably started mastering swordplay straight out of the womb, and it’s just too bad he didn’t have time to learn the more _fun kind of swordplay_ if he knows what you mean-

He buries his head in his hands for a second, muttering something that sounds unnervingly close to _violence is a last resort, violence is a last resort,_ before stalking off to meditate. 

You watch as the magazines fade away in the fading light of sunset, and go out to draw fifteen new ones. 

\---

You spend the next few months this way. To the villagers, you’re a welcome travelling mage, and to one specific person, you are “a test of patience the gods themselves could not have foreseen”. Words are so hurtful. You will be the bigger person. You will only continue gifting this lovely village with as many modern-day items as you can. 

“Do you have this week’s ‘magazine’?” the student says, tugging on your sleeve and whispering her words in hushed tones. 

\---

The more time you spend here, the more you wish the place wasn’t quite so remote. The nearest town is, apparently, over two week’s walk away. Sure, the village is pretty much self-sufficient, and a merchant comes by on a semi-regular basis, but are they really okay living all the way out here on their own?

“Our type of martial arts is best learnt in quiet, serene places,” says the village elder kindly, and “To be honest, our dojo master wanted to leave as well, but training hasn’t been...well...quite so productive as of late.”

You can almost feel the daggers being glared at you from across the room. 

You decide that, after almost six months of staying here and leeching off their kind hospitality, it might be worth your time to make that trek to the nearest town to gather information. At the very least, you should know more about the world you were so rudely dumped into. 

“We’ll miss you,” says your friend, looking a little less like she’ll miss _you_ and a little more like she’ll miss your _magic._ You leave her with an extra magazine, just in case. 

\---

The long trip is made far more comfortable with things like a tent and sleeping bag, and you reach the town with no issues. It’s large, bustling, and far closer to the small towns you’ve seen on your own vacations in your own world.

“Village?” says the waitress at the inn. “There’s a village in those mountains? Are you sure?”

\---

You spend the day asking around, but you can’t make sense of what you hear. That type of martial arts? No, people say. It’s rare. So rare they don’t think anyone still practises it. Why would they? That’s for war, and this country hasn’t had a war in decades. No, they haven’t heard of a village up in the mountains. Who would live in a place so remote? 

You can’t shake the feeling of unease, and as evening falls, the feeling that you’re being watched. 

\---

“Would you mind terribly,” says the cloaked figure, crouching over you on your bed and brandishing a dagger, “if I asked you to tell me a little more about that village in the mountains?”

You jam the taser you slipped under the blanket into its ribs, because you would mind. You would mind very much. 

\---

You drag its unconscious body to the guards, but not before checking for anything useful. The dagger and a little vial of what can only be poison goes into your belt. The mask and cloak go into your bag. And the map, the map that leads so unnervingly close to the village, goes up in flames. 

At the guardhouse, you hear about a war sweeping across the far coast, and it’s a shame that you wasted so long getting to this town just to leave again, but this is what happens when a civilization has not evolved to the point of cell towers and phone lines. 

\---

You skip the path you followed before, choosing instead to make a beeline straight for the village, and again everything seems off. The grass is trampled and wilted. The trees bear burn marks, which is odd, because a fire would have wiped out the grass too, but you try not to think about it too much. You also try not to think about how much more convenient it would be if you could draw yourself a mountain bike, but as it is, you have to hike your unfit self up and across the hilly slopes and dense forest as best you can. 

When you see the light of a campfire, long after the sun has set, you don’t run towards it like you would have in the beginning of your otherworldly trip. You suppose you can count that as character development. 

By the time you manage to sneak up close enough to hear anything, the small group has fallen almost silent, only speaking in quiet tones about how many more days it'll take to find the village. Maybe you were too suspicious. Maybe they're just tourists. 

Then they start discussing the burn rate of chemical fires, and adjusting what you originally thought was just a really big backpack, and really you should have known that the only idiot who would go traipsing around uninhabited mountain ranges here is you. 

\---

It takes you a while to formulate a plan, and the plan is a terrible plan considering how long you had to think about it; but you are neither fast enough to reach the village before them or strong enough to take on a group of ten all at once. Also, it is all your brain can come up with, and so it will have to do. 

"Why don't you stop skulking around the bushes and come out," says the largest, strongest looking member of the group, and suddenly you have to hope your brain can amend the plan in real time. 

He doesn't look too surprised when you join them at their campfire, but then you're wearing the cloak and mask you picked up in town. 

"Do you have the map?" says the same man, who must be the leader, considering he's the one covered in bandages and carrying what you can only assume is a _giant barrel of flammable chemicals._

You shake your head, but point at yourself, and then to the mountain ranges in the distance. 

He nods, looking satisfied enough, and you thank whichever gods are running this world that he doesn't seem to care if you talk. 

Then he picks up your stick, your special precious glowing stick that has been with you since you landed in this world, and _tosses it off the side of the mountain,_ saying _Noxians don't need help to fucking walk,_ and you nod, walk off into the woods, and draw yourself a gun. 

\---

You don't know yet if your gun actually works, but as you lead them down the mountains and towards the valley, in the wrong direction of the village, you're sure you'll have time to find out. 

This way, you mime, pointing at the field of swaying grass in front of you and gesturing for them to go ahead. After a pause, they do, trampling the plants underfoot and not even bothering to conceal their presence - and really, who can blame them? There's no one around to hear a thing, not the loud voices of the men, not the clanking of their equipment, and certainly not gunshots. 

You've quietly pulled your firearm out from your belt, and you're not sure it has enough bullets to do the job, but you can at least get rid of the leader, and the rest should scatter, right? You pause, taking your time, then raise to take aim-

"You traitor," a voice says, and suddenly there's a flash of silver. Before you can even blink, there's a searing pain on your palm, and your gun clatters to the ground, cleanly sliced in half. 

The leader of the group turns, and you only realize that it wasn't him when you see who's standing a distance away. 

"I knew we should never have let a stranger in," he says, lifting his stupid fucking sword and preparing to do another stupid fucking attack and glaring his stupid fucking daggers at you. 

"You idiot," you say, _"you moron,",_ and then there's no time to talk, because the group of men in front of you are poised for battle in a second. The leader hoists the barrel up higher on his back, aims a nozzel you didn't notice until now, and suddenly the area in front is a blazing fire, and honestly, _honestly,_ how useful is a sword going to be against fire? You know what would be useful? _A gun._

No one is listening to you, which you suppose is the only reason you're not dead yet. The swordmaster is moving so fast your eyes can't keep up with him, cutting down the other men, but unless he's fireproof he's not getting to the leader, who’s spraying fire like it’s water from a hose and walking through it like it doesn’t even burn him. You miss the world you came from, a world where the laws of chemistry and physics still apply. But this is not your world, and no matter how much you complain, you don’t want to see the village go up in flames, and so you take a deep breath, pull out the dagger, and make a mad dash for the barrel. 

At first he doesn’t even notice you, but as you haul yourself up onto his back he turns, and you can see the dumbfounded expression even through his mask. You can’t blame him. It’s a dumb idea. But again, your mediocre brain can’t come up with anything better under such short notice, and so you raise the dagger and start stabbing, slicing large, jagged holes down the metal sides of the canister. 

It works. Fuel starts leaking, then flowing out, and suddenly the flames spewing from the nozzle start to sputter. Great for the village. Bad for you, because all that fuel is spilling out in a giant circle right underneath, and this guy may be somehow impervious to flames, but _you_ are already half on fire and going to turn into a meat skewer in record time. 

With a growl, he reaches one huge arm over his back, grabbing you by the collar and almost certainly going to pitch you right into your own barbecue. As you fall, there’s a rush of searing heat, and then suddenly someone is snatching you out of the air. 

The two of you move so fast you seem to teleport, and you end up a distance away, and your cloak is being ripped off you, joining his flaming coat in a pile on the ground. It’s really too bad you can’t rip off your flaming skin.

The last thing you see is the tall man, still standing in a sea of fire, and then blessed darkness. 

\---

You don’t really know how long you spend drifting in and out of consciousness, but when you wake up properly your friend from the dojo is there, fussing over you and wrapping you in so many bandages you can hardly move. 

Apparently the guy with the fire ran out of chemicals and just...left. Just turned and disappeared into the fiery blaze, presumably to go back and refuel for round two. So it’s not like the fight is _over,_ but at least you get a break for now. 

The next few days are a blur of meetings, and people coming in and out of the room to feed you this herbal concoction or that powdered medicine. You’ve recovered enough to move around a little by the time he comes in, standing stiffly by your bedside. 

“I apologize,” he says, not moving an inch and doing an incredible job of looking anywhere but your face. 

“It’s okay,” you say, and “I have something for you,” and he walks a little closer, eyeing your bandaged hand with a palpable sense of guilt. You motion him over, and he leans down, trying not to brush against the bandages. 

You slip a porn magazine into his hands, and he might still have the grace and self-control to walk out of the room first- but it doesn’t make the frustrated scream coming from the hallway any less satisfying. 

\---

\---

\---

EDIT : i got a couple of reqs for his epilogue, so I'm just leaving this here as explanation 🙏

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> reader-chan's gun sadly would not have worked because she doesn't have enough experience actually using one and she would have been turned into reader kabob RIP
> 
> feel free to leave requests in the comments because my tlist is chaotic neutral and i am Afraid


	5. Sett

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> a couple of people actually asked for Sett! wow! Some context is in the bottom notes for readers who aren't familiar with him (THANK YOU FOR READING IN SPITE OF THAT OMG)

When you hit the ground, the first thing you hear is raucous laughter and the roar of a crowd. You pick yourself up, looking around. You can hardly see a thing; the dim lights are obscured by the thick cigar smoke that seems to permeate the entire...room? Building? Where are you, anyway?

A hand clamps down on your shoulder in a firm grip. “You the new fighter?”

What? No. No, you’re not, that sounds very bad, but before you can clarify a middle-aged man is peering at you, muttering to himself that you  _ don’t exactly look like the fighting type. _ He pulls a face mask off the wall and passes it to you, as if that’s the thing that’s going to make you look like you’re the kind of person who volunteers to fight- what? Animals? People? Robots? You want to fight none of those. You hope it’s, like, a pinata or something. 

You realize once you’ve been tossed into the pit and the gate has closed behind you that it is not, in fact a pinata. 

The woman standing in front of you raises her fists, and you can barely see her face for all the bulging muscles in the way. This is it. You are definitely going to die. 

She lunges forward, and you spin around and leap out of the way. The crowd buzzes, confused, as she takes swing after swing and all you do is flee. You’re pretty sure that if she gets even one hit in, you’re going to crack like a watermelon, and the thought alone is making you queasy, so  _ run away _ it is. You sprint laps around the pit, clamber up the steel caged sides, and generally lead her around like you’re the roadrunner and she’s a Wile E. Coyote who could actually murder you. 

The crowd, who at first was fluctuating between puzzled and ambivalent, is actually getting into it. They’re back to laughing, cheering, putting bets on how long you’re going to last, and it’s  _ so nice _ that they’re enjoying themselves while you’re over here trying your very best not to die. 

You’re grabbed by one arm and dragged back. The woman, panting with exertion and looking a hundred shades of done, has finally caught up to you. You panic, flail, and graze the side of her face with one arm. Suddenly, there’s a spark, like a jolt of electricity has passed between you, and it’s a hundred times less romantic than it sounds, because after a split second she just…drops. Falls to the floor like a sack of potatoes, and for a brief, horrible moment you wonder if you’ve murdered someone-

A soft snore.

“She’s asleep,” says someone in the crowd disbelievingly, and then people are on their feet, screaming  _ oh my god _ and  _ what the hell  _ and shaking the entire arena with their clamoring. 

You stand where you are and try not to pass out from shock.

\---

“You were great,” says the man, handing you “your cut”.  _ “No one _ thought you were gonna make it. We made a killing!”

You weigh the bulging sack of what look like actual gold coins against his glee over the fact that literally no one thought you were going to win, and pick money over dignity.

“Ain’t seen you around before,” says someone else, leaning against the doorway.

“She did great, boss,” says the man, clapping you on the back, but you’re too busy staring, open-mouthed; because the other man, the boss, has  _ cat ears. _

\---

If pressed, you wouldn’t say you had a particularly strong attraction to animal-eared characters. It is a trope. A cliche. But that was then, when that cliche only existed in shows and books, and this is now, when a living, breathing, cat-eared man is standing in front of you and waiting for you to say something. 

“Are those real?” you say, reaching for the ears, and he literally picks you up and tosses you out the door.

\---

You actually come back the next evening, because after an entire day of exploring the town, you can’t find even one other animal-eared person. Maybe you hallucinated it. Maybe it was just your imagination.

“Back again?” he says, alcohol in one hand and a pouch of gold in the other. Nope. The ears are definitely still there. You resist the urge to try and touch them. 

Apparently, insulting the boss doesn’t matter, as long as you’re willing to fight. 

Well. “Fight”. Whenever you step into the pit, it’s less of a fight, and more of a really high-level game of chicken. You’re not sure why, but when you touch someone you have the ability to put them right to sleep, out like a light, dropping like a stone where they stand, and that counts as being “unable to fight”. What "a fight" ends up turning into is them chasing you around, trying to trip you up or knock you out without giving you time to touch them instead, and for some reason, this is entertaining. The crowd  _ enjoys it.  _

You take a moment to reflect upon how grateful you are that your world has things like movies and the internet. 

\---

This goes on for a month or two, and not only is it doing  _ wonders  _ as cardio, but you’re also racking up a pretty good amount of gold. The pit boss, on the other hand, is having a slightly less enjoyable time. 

“Outta the way,” he says, swiping you aside when you try to ask him about his ears.

“You got time to talk, you got time to fight,” he says, pushing you into the back room when you ask about his family. 

_ “Quit gawkin’,” _ he growls, after two solid weeks of you sneaking glances at him from around the arena. 

“If you wanna fight him, all you gotta do is ask,” says the back-room attendant, handing you your mask. 

It’s not  _ quite  _ what you were looking for, but you appreciate the advice anyway.

\---

You realize it’s perhaps time to retire from your winning streak the day an opponent pulls out a weapon. 

You’re pretty sure daggers aren’t allowed, but you’re also pretty sure this  _ entire underground fighting ring _ isn’t allowed, so you’re on your own as the dagger-wielding man rushes closer, confident in his victory. You leap aside, but he keeps coming, and you can’t get closer without running into the knife. The crowd, as usual, is a mass of cheering, drunken people, and you pay them no mind as you try to figure out a way to get your hands on your opponent. He rushes up to you again, and this time the dagger finds its mark, slicing a deep gash into your side. 

_ Ow.  _ You can feel the pain even through the adrenaline, and over the roar of the crowd you can hear someone shouting to  _ stop the fight, stop the fucking fight, _ but you did come to win. You’re pretty sure all your gold can get you as much medical treatment as you need, so as he runs up to you again, you turn, block his knife with one arm, and punch him right in the face. 

You cannot actually block a knife with an arm. The knife wins. But the owner of the knife is out cold on the dirt floor, so it probably all evens out.

\---

The back-room team does a fantastic job of fixing you up. You suppose they’re used to it. 

“Where’s your boss?” you ask, as they finish with the last of the bandages.

“Out back,” says one of them, jerking his head in the direction of the door. 

You walk outside, and there he is, out back just like they said, beating the shit out of your opponent. 

\---

“Sorry,” he says, as you watch a pit employee drag the guy away. 

It’s not a big deal. You have more than enough gold to last you, even if you never fight again.

“We still got rules,” he says, eyeing your bandages. 

“It’s okay,” you say. “Can I touch your ears?”

He groans.

\---

He does not, in fact, let you touch his ears. What he does do is bring you back to his office and proceed to get the both of you  _ absolutely fucking wasted. _

You’re not sure if you should be drinking with these many open wounds, but  _ holy crap, _ alcohol in this world tastes good. You suppose a world without video games and television has to make do. 

“Just lemme,” you slur, trying to reach across the table even though you’re long past being sober enough to move your limbs. 

“You got a hell of a kink,” he slurs back, tilting his head and downing another mouthful of booze. No one has an alcohol tolerance that strong. This man should be dead. 

You don’t remember what happens after, but when you regain control of your brain, the both of you are still in the office, slumped over one another and groaning in pain, and there are a dozen more empty bottles than you remember. 

\---

You don’t fight after that, but it’s become a habit to turn up late in the night and get comfortably drunk in his office. 

Now, with the fight long over and the crowds long gone, he seems a little more comfortable, and he’s actually willing to talk, especially when you tell him you're from a country so distant they've never even heard of animal people. 

Apparently he's a half-breed, a mix of human and animal-person; and from what it sounds like, this world takes that about as well as your world took mixed-race marriage in the fifties. 

"Sorry," you say, because what else do you say to a kid whose dad ran off and left him alone?

"'S not  _ your _ fault," he says, finishing off another bottle. 

You make a mental note not to bring up the ears again. 

\---

The more time you spend together, the more comfortable you both get, until it gets to the point where people in the crowd will single you out, pointing and whispering about the  _ vastaya-fucker.  _

"What's a vastaya and why am I fucking it?" you ask him, and he goes  _ mad.  _

He's out and in the arena in a second, grabbing the hapless customer by the throat and screaming an array of threats so wide you're pretty sure that guy will be dead long before he gets even halfway through them. You have to drag him back to his office before he starts murdering paying customers. 

You find out, thirty minutes and two bottles of alcohol later, that it's just what people call animal-people here. 

“That’s it?” you say in disbelief. 

“People here don’t share your preferences,” he says, wiping the blood off his hands with a towel. 

Yes, well, it’s all moot point, isn’t it, because it’s not like there are any actual Vastaya around for you to meet. You’ve combed the entire town by now, and it looks like even in this world you can’t catch a break, and you would get “vastaya-fucker” tattooed on your _ goddamn forehead _ if it meant you could actually find one of them to-

He stares at you. You put down the wine bottle. 

“The vastaya community lives  _ outside  _ the city,” he says, and suddenly you’re on your feet and rushing out the door. 

He stumbles to his feet, grabbing your arm. “Wait!”

You wait. He shakes you, clearly frustrated at your inability to understand whatever argument he thinks he’s making. 

“Humans and vastaya  _ don’t mix. _ You’re the girl, what d’you think they’re gonna say about you, huh? You know how many people I had to beat up for talking shit about my ma just cause she got with a human-”

You pat his hand. This poor, simple fool actually thinks a few judgemental words are going to stop you from going out, hitting on as many animal-eared people as you can, and hopefully finding one that likes you. 

“You don’t get it,” he says, still shaking you like a rattle. “They ain’t never gonna stop judging you, that’s why I didn’t-”

You clasp his hands with your own, trying to pour as much sincerity into the gesture as your inebriated brain will allow.

_ “I don’t care,” _ you say, and sprint out the door.

\---

The houses outside the city walls are dark, quiet and in a more noticeable state of disrepair. You wander the silent streets, trying to find some kind of tavern or bar, but there’s not even a single person out here besides you. 

You’re so distracted looking around that you only realize someone’s in front of you when it’s too late to dodge.

“Oof,” says the woman on the ground. Crap. 

“No, no, I’m fine,” she says, and you help her pick up her things. She peers at you. 

“It’s been a while since I’ve seen a human out here,” she says, patting your hand. You ask if she knows any taverns nearby, and she shakes her head, but invites you over to her house instead, because “What’s a young girl like you doing out here all alone this late?”

You start to demur, because that sounds like the exact opposite of the night out you were hoping for, when you look a little closer and realize she doesn’t have human ears. 

\---

“Another cup of tea?” she says, settling down in the chair across from you. 

You shake your head, holding your cup and listening with rapt attention as she continues talking, telling you all about her son, her tall, strong, handsome son who works so hard at his job, building orphanages for children, taking care of her all on his own. 

Tall. Strong.  _ Builds orphanages. _ You try not to swoon out loud. 

She tells you that he visits her almost every day, and you’re still trying to think of a way to convince her to let you stay until he shows up when you hear the crash of the door being kicked in.

_ “Found you,” _ says the man. Who? Who is this? Why is he looking for you?

He blinks, then holds up the dagger he pulled out on you in the pit, and  _ oh.  _ Talk about holding a grudge.

“What’s going on?” says the woman, shrinking back, and you nudge her around until she’s standing behind you. The man growls, lifting his knife and making a straight line towards you, and you’d think he’d know by now to just  _ throw  _ the dagger instead of getting within touching range. 

You can’t dodge, because dodging leaves the nice old lady as a wide open target, but what you  _ can  _ do is take that stupid dagger in the arm again and punch him in the face twice as hard, and then beat his unconscious body with a chair just to be sure this time. You hope this doesn’t reflect badly on her impression of you, because you really, really want to meet her son-

Suddenly, the man is  _ yanked  _ backwards, dragged out the door into the darkness of the street outside. A thud, a scream, a few more thuds, and then silence. 

The woman peers around you, just as a familiar figure steps into the dim entranceway light. 

“Settrigh,” she says, relieved, reaching out for her son as you gawp at the man walking into the room, your visions of meeting the Vastaya of your dreams going up in smoke.

_ “Orphanages,”  _ you whisper.

He groans. 

\---

“Such a good boy,” she says proudly, pouring you another cup of tea. The one you have in your hand is cold. You haven’t drank it, because he’s been staring at you the whole time, and you know he’s dying to drag you out and ask you a hundred questions, but-

“Yes,” you say. “So good. So...so orphans.” 

Does this woman really believe that her son, her brute of a son who wears nothing but a fur coat and stripper pants, really spends his days as a construction worker? 

She beams at you. Yes. Yes, she does.    
  
He looks at you again, almost pleadingly, and you just know that he’s never going to let her find out what he actually does for a living. 

“You must be proud,” you say, and “He’s a good person,” because even if he doesn’t actually build orphanages, he still looks out for you, and he is still your friend. 

She smiles, and you can feel him breathe again, settling into the sofa beside you and brushing his hand against yours. 

\---

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CONTEXT for all the readers who aren't into this character (god bless you...BLESS YOU FOR STILL READING THIS ANYWAY)
> 
> Things that Sett, mister "started from the bottom and now we here", has done in canon:  
> \- Take over a vice ring by beating up the previous owners  
> \- Get filthy rich off of being a criminal overlord  
> \- Tell his mother he builds orphanages for a living and expect her to believe him


	6. Sett | Epilogue (E)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sett's story is done! I owe a lot of chapters in a lot of fics their explicit epilogues askfjdskjg pray 4 me

He’s going to have to tell her  _ sometime. _

“She ain’t gonna find out,” he says, in the most breathtaking display of misplaced confidence you’ve ever seen. You’re not sure what other incredible lies he’s told this poor woman in the past, but it’s going to come back and bite him in the ass someday. In the meantime, you drop by every once in a while, half because you’re still hoping to run into other vastaya, and half because she’s always so happy to see you. 

“That boy never brings any of his friends around,” she says, refilling your cup and going on about how she hopes he can make friends, get along with everyone, maybe find a special someone like she did? 

You think about his father, and you think about the people he works with, and sip your tea in silence.

\---

Aside from his mother, you never do see any other vastaya around. Extensive research (you follow him around and repeat your questions over and over again until he gives up) reveals that purebred animal-people are rare because most of them live in seclusion, choosing to separate themselves from the humans encroaching the land, and aren’t at all keen to show themselves.

“Y'know pure vastaya live to hundreds of years old, right?” he says, crossing his arms. “You really into that?”   
  


Age gap could be a thing. You’re open-minded.

\---

You don’t fight in the pit anymore, and that apparently makes you less worthy of respect. Usually you’re hanging out with the boss, and so people steer clear, but once in a while you show up alone and  _ wow.  _ The whispered insults are a constant buzz in your ear, and if this is half of what his mother had to deal with you can understand why he resorted to just beating everyone up. 

“They givin’ you any trouble?” he always asks, and you always say no, because you don’t need him to look out for you. You are not his mother. You try to ignore it the first few times, but as the days, then weeks go on, your patience wears thin. 

The tipping point is when a customer, drunk out of his mind, walks up to you _ , _ sneering  _ why don’t you give us a show, _ and suddenly you’re grabbing him by the collar and shoving him against the wall, shaking him like a magic 8-ball and smacking him in the face over and over, screaming  _ a show? A show? You think I don’t want a show? Coming up to me talking about a god damn show, I can’t even get tickets to the opening act, you go find me a catboy who’s actually willing to give me the time of day and then maybe I can give you your fucking show- _

“He’s asleep,” someone says, putting a hand on your shoulder, and oh. Damn your magic hands. You dump the unconscious man in the middle of the rapidly-clearing area, suddenly not quite so angry, because you suppose there’s at least  _ one  _ catboy who’s willing to talk to you. 

\---

You’re not sure what happened to that man after that, but you don’t see him around anymore.

\---

_ You  _ may be having a hard time getting any action, but  _ he’s _ not, and you’re not at all bitter about it. Not even a little bit. 

“Stop throwin’ my gold out the window,” he says, dragging you back. You don’t get it. He’s constantly being swarmed by women and men, hanging off his arms when he goes to watch over his fighting ring, it looks  _ easy. _ Isn’t being rich all that is required to get laid around here?  _ You’re  _ rich.  _ You  _ have gold. Why isn’t it working for you?

“Only works on humans,” he says, making sure his gold and his alcohol are out of your reach. “An’ only the greedy ones.” 

If there’s so many people hanging off him all day, you’d think they’d also get the same treatment from asshole customers, but no. Apparently it's fine if  _ they _ fuck him. 

“You’re the only one that ain’t after the money,” he says.

So yes. It’s just you. It’s just you and your new life of self-imposed celibacy, and maybe you should consider going on a pilgrimage to whatever mountain village these animal-people are hiding out in, because you’re verging on desperate at this point.

“Y’know, if you’re so desperate,” he says, leaning back in his chair, “There’s a vastaya sittin’ right in front of you-”

“No,” you say, and “I have no time for your human orgies,” and “What would your mother think?” 

His mother, who wants him to find someone special. A  _ single  _ someone special, you can only assume, and just picturing her face if she ever sees the heathen’s den her son has built makes your head hurt. You can barely look her in the eyes as it is.

“I- what-  _ I don’t do human orgies,” _ he says, and you swipe one of his more expensive bottles of alcohol for daring to lie to your face like that. 

\---

You spend more time out wandering the forests that border the city, searching for any hints of nonhuman folk, and less time in the pit. If he notices, you can't tell, but you're pretty sure he's busy enough without you bothering him. 

"He was just here," says his mother. "Settrigh's been looking for you. Why don't you wait a while?" 

You would—then she mentions hearing that a mountain tribe has come down to trade, only for a few days, and you bolt. 

\---

The tribe, or what little you can see of them, really live up to their reputation of shunning people. You can never get close enough to talk, and they disappear the moment you turn your head. 

You've taken to hiding among the dense shrubbery of the forest for the last couple of days, like some kind of woodland stalker, but the glimpses of the vastaya that you can see make it worth it. They're  _ gorgeous. _ An entire tribe of animal-eared models, and sure, they don't know you exist, but you can probably get something valuable from the markets to trade and then you'll be  _ one step closer to getting a vastaya to like you.  _

"What are you doing here," one of them says, looking in your direction. You freeze, panicking, the last thing you need is to get outed to the entire tribe as "that creepy human who's been following us around"—

"Ma asked me to see how the tribe's doin'," someone else says, and you blink as he steps out from the shadows. "Dunno why she bothers." 

The tribal vastayan sneers, and oh, that's not a good look on his pretty face. 

"We banished her for a reason, half-breed. Go back and play with the humans like you've always done." 

You feel like you really shouldn't be watching this, but you can't get out of the bushes without making a racket, and so you're forced to sit and watch this incredible uncomfortable situation unfold in its entirety. You watch as he snarls, and for a moment you're sure he's going to start throwing punches, but—no. He stands down, probably because his mom would be horrified to hear that he got into a fight. 

"Rather be with 'er than wastin' my time here," he says, ears flat back against his head. 

The other vastayan hisses. "You're not welcome here. Your family is a disgrace, your mother should never have laid with that human, your birth shames our entire tri-" 

You hear growling, and you’re pretty sure there’s going to be a fight. Unfortunately for all three of you, it’s not going to be between beast-people. The tribal vastayan has no time to even process what’s happening before you launch yourself out of the bushes, leaping at him, and suddenly the two of you are rolling on the floor, exchanging kicks and punches and screaming your heads off. You elbow him in the face, yelling about  _ bigotry  _ and  _ racism  _ and  _ basic human rights.  _ He claws at you, shrieking about  _ superior lineages _ and _ not mixing with the filthy humans that stole our land and our magic,  _ and really you don’t quite understand it, but you’re too busy trying to pull out all his fur to ask. 

You don’t know how long you’ve been yelling at him for, but when you pause to take a breath you can feel someone shaking your shoulder. 

“He’s asleep,” he says, and you decide your next move will be to buy gloves and wear them for the rest of your life.

\---

It takes a little while to bandage up all the scratches. 

“Hidin’ in the bushes,” he says, grinning. “Romantic. Sorry ‘bout that,” he adds, wrapping the last of the bandages around your ankle. “Know you were lookin’ forward to…y’know.” 

Whatever. Vastayans are overrated. Stuck-up, judgemental furries. You didn’t need them anyway. 

The hand around your ankle  _ yanks, _ and suddenly you’re very close to someone who you only just remembered used to beat up people for a living, and okay, maybe you didn’t have to call all Vastayans stuck-up furries. You can walk back your words. Anything to avoid getting punched in the face.

“Offer still stands,” he says. “I’m right here. Just sayin’. Half-breed ain’t good enough?”

What? That’s not the problem, and you don't know how many times you need to remind him that his sweet old mother would die of a heart attack if she saw this fighting ring, let alone the kinds of debauchery- 

He shakes you.  _ “I don’t do human orgies!  _ Look, look,” he says, perhaps only now realizing that he’s trying to have a conversation with the type of person who, mere hours ago, thought that hiding in shrubbery for three days straight was a good first step to initiating friendship. “I can’t tell my ma about anythin’ or anybody here. Nothin’ about my entire goddamn life-  _ except you. _ So if you’re so worried ‘bout her, why don’t you just  _ pick me?” _

Actually- he’s not wrong. It kind of makes sense. And if he ever wants to make his mother proud, he can’t just bring home any of the other people that hang around the fight pit.

“Okay,” you say.

He blinks. “That easy?”

What, would he rather it be harder? You can make it harder, you’re pretty sure you can ask his mother about vastayan courting rituals, really drag it out-

“Wait, wait, I ain’t complainin’,” he says, and shuffles a little bit, getting even more up in your face. "So how do you wanna, uh-" 

What kind of question is that? You crane your neck up and kiss him. Maybe animal people have another way of doing it. You hope it at least involves bodily organs that you also own. 

He makes a surprised  _ mmph _ sound, and then he's leaning over you, shoving you up against the couch and licking into your mouth and doing his best to turn you into a flat, body-shaped impression in the cushions. You run your hands up across his bare chest, skimming over the skin, half to be affectionate and half to get his ridiculous fur coat off. You will not have sex with that still on. The silk pants are bad enough. 

"Hold up, listen, wasn't asking how you wanna do  _ this," _ he says, but honestly, it's been months, and you might die if you stop now. You yank him back in for another kiss. 

He shrugs the coat to the floor, thank god, and then his hands are back on you, flat against your thighs and pushing your legs up, as if you weren't already mashed enough into the sofa, and making quick work of your clothes. You feel him put his mouth on your neck and bite down, just the barest scrape of sharp teeth. He sucks hard enough to leave a bruise, one hand holding your leg up while the other wanders lower, rough fingers pressing into your skin. 

Sex is all about give and take, but the way he just goes straight for every erogenous zone he can find is kind of distracting. You bite his neck, he crowds you into the couch just a little bit more. You try to kiss him, but his mouth is already otherwise occupied. You try to palm his dick, and he straight up just shoves two fingers inside you and there goes all your coordination. You give up and just shove your hand down his pants, because apparently this is a competition, and now you want to win. 

“Ah, fuck,” he says, arching into it, and you take a moment to just...check. Seems normal. You weren’t sure, what with the whole beast-person thing. His hands stutter, distracted, and you take the opportunity to yank his pants down and get a good look. 

“Uh,” he says, pausing. “You lookin’ for somethin’ in particular, or…”

“Just checking,” you say, because you are. And you should really know now if any of those tropes you read about online are true, but apparently they are not. 

“Knock yerself out,” he says, reaching for a bottle and pouring what looks like lube (they have that here? They don't use cooking oil or some other terrible thing?) onto his fingers, and you only have a second to process this before said fingers are back, already shoved in and pressing insistently deeper, pulling out and pushing back in over and over before you have time to catch your breath. 

It's a fight to get yourself moving again, but you snatch up the bottle, spilling a copious amount in the process, slide your hand all the way down again and there we go, that makes everything easier. Everything is hot and slick and if you go by the way he's thrusting up into your hand and making little choked-off noises, it's really about time to move on. 

You angle yourself and hook one arm around his neck and he gets the message, clamping his hands on your legs and looking down at you one more time to check, and then pushing in with one long, deep thrust. 

It's only when he starts moving that you realize the silk pants are still half-on, but you can forgive it this one time. 

"Gonna make fun of me  _ now?" _ he says. "Concentrate." 

He plants his arms on either side for support, bending you almost in half in the process, and you kind of should have expected it, but he fucks just like how he lives his life, hard and brutal, pounding into you with the sort of single-minded focus he'd normally reserve for a fight. 

You wrap your hands around his neck and hang on; there’s not enough space for you to breathe, let alone move, he’s crowded you so far up against the cushions you can barely see anything except him. He tilts your head up and bites down, right at the pulse point, and if this was a competition, you lose right then and there. He fucks you through your orgasm, ignoring the scratches you leave down his back, snarling like he’s half out of it himself, and in the heat and dizzying friction your addled brain wonders hysterically if he has a knot, or something, that you didn’t notice the whole time your hand was down there-

A pause. A second or two for him to catch his breath, and then.

“Did’ya  _ see  _ a knot,” he says, wonderingly, peering down at you as if to check that he didn’t actually fuck your brains out. 

You kick him in the leg, but it doesn’t seem to have any effect. 

“Mind if I get back to it,” he says, nuzzling the side of your neck, and fine. It’s only fair. You wrap your legs around his waist as best you can and grind down, trying to help him along, and his thrusts go more and more erratic. You mimic him, leaning up and biting the tense muscles along his neck and it sends him over the edge, panting into your shoulder and gripping the cushions so hard it rips. 

\---

The sofa is sticky. The both of you are sticky. It’s a very uncomfortable place and you might have gotten a little too heavy-handed with that lube and you should move as soon as possible. 

“‘S fine,” he says, dragging you back and wrapping his arms so tight all the lube in the world couldn’t help you slip out. You’d think someone with fur would be in even more need of a shower, but he seems happy enough to just sit there and cuddle. Uncomfortably. 

“So yer comin’ over tonight, right?” he says, and “I can tell ‘er about us, right?” and you thought this was the time when he would lounge around and act like the king of coitus, but no. Apparently this is the time when he makes sure you can’t escape and badgers you about telling his mother until you say yes, so you say yes.

“‘Kay,” he says, as if it was all your idea, but then he squishes you and presses his face against your hair and does such an accurate impression of a big cat that you just can’t bear to do anything except sit there and humor him. 

\---

  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sett and his mother in canon did actually get excommunicated from the tribe because the vastayan-human union was considered disgraceful and unthinkable, and do you ever wonder sometimes if the writers just put in drama for drama's sake, like was it really that much of a surprise that these two only-slightly-different species would dick down or
> 
> look im just saying if this world is anything like our world theres GONNA BE some furries im JUST SAYING


	7. Jhin

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> there was a request for jhin! wow! some context is in the end notes for people who aren't into him (thank you so much for reading anyway!!)

The first thing you notice is the silence. It’s worlds apart from the noise and rush of the city you were just in, and it only occurs to you much, much later that you are, literally, worlds apart. 

The people at the temple help you up, welcome you into their monastery, and lend you a bed, but they can’t answer any of your questions. You’re in a place you’ve never heard of, in a country you’ve never heard of, in a world you’ve never heard of. 

You try not to scream too loudly. You don’t want to disturb the silence of the temple grounds.

\---

“I’ve never heard of that country,” the head priest says, looking sympathetic. “Could you describe it to me?”

His eyes grow very, very wide when you start recounting everything you know about your city in as much detail as you can, and it’s only when you look up and see the giant projection of your city street behind you that you realize he’s not actually in awe of your incredible story-telling. 

You don’t quite know what you’re doing, or why you’re doing it, but when you try to run into the street the projection disappears into smoke. It’s not a portal. It’s not even tangible. It’s just a bunch of moving images. Your magic power, apparently, is to be a walking talking television, and you turn to the head priest to tell him that, only to see that he’s disappeared.

\---

As expected, no one here has even heard of your city. In fact, no one here has even heard of planes, or cars, or large industrial vehicles, which explains why the head priest ran screaming at the sight of an eight-wheeler heading his way. 

You show him your country’s gardens, its lakes and mountains instead; and also promise never to tell any of the other priests about it. He seems appeased. 

\---

The priest's suggestion that you venture out to see the rest of the city turns out to be a fantastic idea. Not only does this country value the performing arts, it’s also willing to pay for its entertainment, and what’s more entertaining than a wide-screen movie with surround sound? If you concentrate enough, you can screen anything you’ve seen before - shows, movies, live performances, all somehow shown in high-definition, even if you can only vaguely remember watching them. 

You spend the day blaring classical music like a one-man orchestra from a corner on the street, and when you donate your bag of gold to the head priest, he stares at it for so long you actually get up and check for signs of a heart attack.

\---

So you may not have a way to go back home yet, but at least you’re not starving. In fact, you’re doing great. You’ve made enough just by being a human projection system that you can live in comfort for the foreseeable future, and until someone invents this world’s version of television, you’ve basically cornered the market. 

“Don’t stay out too late,” says the priest. “The night has its dangers.” 

He refuses to tell you what exactly those dangers are, and so the first thing you do is walk down to the nearest tavern to find out. 

\---

Between the yelling and the copious amounts of alcohol, you figure out that you have two possible causes of concern: a brewing war along the coastline, or a murderous demonic entity that roams the night, killing with abandon and leaving twisted, hideous corpses in its wake. 

You get a map and make sure to mark out the cities by the coastline so you can avoid them.

“You must not underestimate the demon,” says the head priest urgently, but a children’s story is not going to kill you. You know what _will_ kill you? Getting caught in the crossfire of a war, and so when you get a letter from an apparently prominent diplomat asking for your services at their party, in a city that’s far, far from the coastline, you pack up, leave an obscene amount of gold with the priests, and head off.

\---

The party goes over fantastically. You’ve never seen a group of people so enthusiastic about Home Alone 1 and 2. They keep you at the reception, asking things like _where is the little boy now_ and _what is Christmas_ and _why do they keep trying to catch a plane, is it hard to capture,_ and you end up staying far longer than anticipated. It’s dark by the time you finally leave, opting not to stay the night and be subjected to answering more questions and, god forbid, having to screen the rest of the sequels. 

The diplomat tells you about an inn nearby, and as you leave, you can hear his children talking about a golden demon that comes out at night, stealing people away to turn them into twisted art displays. 

“You should stay,” they say, pulling at your clothes with small hands; but you look into their eyes, and you know there is no sympathy. There is only Home Alone 3. 

\---

The streets outside are pitch black. No one else seems to go out past dark, at least not out in city fringes where you are. You walk down empty paths and deserted alleys, trying to find the inn they told you about, but all you can see are dark, quiet houses, if there even are houses at all. 

You walk past an old, crumbling church and try not to think about horrific murders.

A flicker of light, so faint you almost miss it. A candle in the window? A reflection in the moonlight? Whatever it is, you’re so desperate to ask for directions you don’t think twice before turning and knocking on the heavy wooden doors of the church. 

Silence. The door creaks open, just a little. 

You walk inside. There are no such things as demons. 

\---

Not even moonlight can penetrate the gloom of the empty church. _Empty._ Not a face in sight, not a single person you can ask for directions, and you’re taking a second to mourn the loss of GPS when you hear the tapping. 

One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. 

You spin around, but now there’s someone standing between you and the wooden doors. 

“I wasn’t expecting visitors,” he says politely, even though his mouth doesn’t move, and you only have a second to realize that he’s wearing a mask before he’s pulling out what looks like a _gargantuan rifle_ and yes. The priest was right. It looks like there are demons, and by demons you mean a serial killer, and it is time for you to leave. 

He’s swinging the rifle up, but before he can fire you’ve thrown up as huge and as bright and as loud a display as you can. You have no time to concentrate, so what shows up is a mishmash of movies and plays and music, bright lights and clashing sounds, all flashing in and out of each other. 

“What,” he says, stunned, and you take the opportunity to slip past him and out a broken window.

He snaps out of it the moment the display starts to fade, and you can hear footsteps, and a frustrated scream of _wait,_ but you’re out of the window, already running down the street.

\---

You’ve walked the entire night, all the way back to the city, before you realize you left your bag at the church. Despite your sudden lack of identification papers, when you tell the guards about what you saw, they actually take you seriously. 

Maybe you shouldn’t ask about how prolific this serial killer is. 

Nothing happens the next day, or the next, and by the third day you’re confident enough to leave the city again- this time in broad daylight. 

“Don’t go back there,” says a guard, shaking his head, but from the stories you’ve heard, this demon moves around, and so he’s probably gone, and so you can go back and get the bag you so stupidly dropped a few nights ago. 

\---

The church is, again, deserted, and nowhere near as intimidating in the daytime. You let yourself in through the same wooden doors and your small bag is there, lying right where you dropped it underneath the window. You snatch it up, leaping back just in case there’s a trap waiting for you- no. No trap. In fact, no sign of life at all, no indication that anyone’s ever been here. 

You’re about to let yourself back out when you hear the sound of tapping again, faint and farther away this time, like it’s coming from the back of the building. 

You panic, haul yourself up and across the pews, and scramble up a ladder to the small wooden platform right under the roof. 

When he comes in this time, it’s not with the polite, graceful walk he had before. He’s pissed about something, and even in your current state you can see that he’s being an _absolute fucking drama queen about it._

He _throws_ his cane, and it sails dramatically through the air, landing with a clatter on the wooden altar. He follows it (apparently he doesn’t even need it to walk), throwing his hands up in the air and complaining incessantly to himself about _what was that display_ and _how is one expected to concentrate_ and _I cannot work with these distractions._

You keep waiting for him to leave, or to busy himself with something serial-killer-y, or _something_ so that you can sneak out, but he paces the pews and flings his hands around dramatically and _simply doesn’t fuck off,_ and before you know it, the sun’s rays are casting long, eerie shadows across the floor as it sets, _and he is still complaining._

You give up. If it’s your time to die, you will die, but you will not listen to his broadway diva impression for a minute more. 

He starts, shocked, when the first bars of the overture begin to fill the room, but when The Phantom of the Opera flickers to life, he doesn’t move. He doesn’t even look around. He stands where he is, frozen in place, and watches the entire two acts without moving an inch. 

You hope he likes it. It’s got that mask, after all. 

As the finale plays, you make it extra-loud and extra-bright, hoping that it covers any sound you make slipping back down the ladder and out the window. 

He turns his head, just for a moment, so slightly you’re not sure if he’s actually noticed you.

He says something, drowned out by the last notes of the finale, and the only thing you can make out is “Elaborate. But it could use more…”

You’re gone before you can hear any more, but you’re pretty sure the last word was “violence”. 

\---

The entire city is still on edge, because apparently no one’s been horrifically murdered yet, and it’s a matter of _when,_ not _if._

You think about how he sat there, riveted and unmoving, and about the fact that no one has died yet. And you go back to the church the next evening. 

\---

Every few days you go back, climbing up the ladder, and every time you do, he appears like magic at sunset, sitting on one of the wooden pews and looking exactly like a guest at a theatre. You never talk, but _he_ does, going on and on for ages about his impressions of whichever part of whichever show he just watched as if he knows you’re there. 

Well, of course he knows you’re there somewhere. But he doesn’t try to shoot you again. 

A week goes by. Two weeks. A month. And still, no murders. No one’s gotten their insides rearranged. You, and the city you’re in, slowly fall back into your daily lives, because _they_ think he’s already moved on, and _you_ can’t tell them it’s because he’s distracted with the magic of CGI. 

Your work gets busier as you get even more popular, and one evening you almost forget to go to the church. You’re barely in time to scramble up the ladder before he turns up, sitting on the wooden seat as always. You start the show, some splatter film you saw long ago (it’s his jam, right?), and lean against the wall. The screams and chainsaw sounds are so...relaxing. So soothing. You don’t have to concentrate to use your magic anymore, and the church is warm and dry, and your eyelids feel so heavy. 

“Not the best seat in the house,” someone says, and your eyes snap open. 

He’s standing on the ladder, his gun nowhere to be seen. Before he can say anything else, you leap to your feet in a panic- or try to. The roof is right above you; you slam your head against it, and topple straight off the ledge. 

He reaches for you, and you have a second to realize that he’s _also_ panicking before he grabs your arm- but instead of pulling you up, he loses his grip on the ladder and the both of you land in a dusty, painful heap on the wooden floor. 

You groan, picking yourself up, but when you look over to check on him he’s right back in diva mode. 

_“Argh,”_ he says, hauling himself to his feet, checking his outfit, and garbling incoherently about _perfection_ and _ruining everything_ and stomping around in a huff. You take it to mean he’s not hurt, and also, it’s kind of hard to see ‘cold-blooded serial killer’ when ‘melodramatic prima-donna" is taking up all your attention. 

“Should I continue the show,” you say, and he thumps himself back into his seat with a dramatic _yes._

\---

You've continued your odd little arrangement for almost two months by now, and you find yourself falling into a strange sense of complacency. Maybe it's because he hasn't said a thing about murder, or because now you just sit around on one of the pews instead of hiding, or because all he does is give you his very biased opinion about all the shows and ask you inane questions about how they made the blood so _real._

"Computer graphics," you say, and watch as he nods and pretends to understand _exactly_ what you're talking about. This man can never let himself be wrong about anything. 

\---

Sometimes he blames his ignorance of your world on the stupidest, most pointless things, instead of just accepting that he _will not be able to understand every single thing that comes from another world._

"Why do you insist on speaking in that _infuriating way,"_ he mutters, tugging at his cloak and glaring at you like it's all your fault you can’t explain how every single movie does their VFX. Big talk coming from someone who swans around saying things like _my genius will never be understood_ and _my art must be absolute perfection_ and still uses phrases like _my dear._

"I fail to see why you cannot appreciate a more dignified manner of speech, my dear. My _darling,"_ he says, when you don't reply, "My dearest, my sweet, the light of my-" 

He throws his head back and laughs when you elbow him in the ribs, and you wonder when you stopped expecting him to murder you. 

\---

It turns out that even though _you_ may not expect him to murder anytime soon, there are people who pay him for his work, and _they_ most definitely do- and you find this out only when one of them grabs you as you walk into the church and holds a knife to your throat. 

“I hate to see you so distracted,” they say, and you can see him stiffen, fingers twitching for a gun he’s not pulling out for reasons that you hope have to do with not wanting his patron to gut you like a fish. 

“Art requires _patience,”_ he snarls, and the two of them are off, trading insults that seem to come from the pages of a 16th-century novel. You half expect them to start throwing gloves at each other to demand duels. 

As entertaining as this is, you’d prefer not to be so uncomfortably close to the sharp blade of that knife, even more so when the man loses patience and presses the blade ever-so-slightly in. 

_“Wait,”_ your serial-killer friend (friend?) says, a desperate edge creeping into his voice, and this is just getting kind of sad. It can only go two ways - either you escape, or you get your throat cut and bleed out, and if that happens, hopefully you die as theatrically as these two clowns deserve. 

You concentrate, and suddenly there’s another serial killer, standing to the right of you. And another. And another. You create as many displays of him as you can, trying to make them all as realistic as possible. 

They look at the man standing behind you, and they all laugh, raising their guns as one. The man flinches, paling, and you take a second to fully appreciate the fact that special effects don’t exist in this country as he drops his knife and turns to flee.

A single, actual shot cracks through the church. You suppose he couldn’t go _too_ long without actually killing someone.

\---

“I’m okay,” you say, as he tilts your head for the third time, to check the thin line where the blade edge cut your skin.

“Will you just hold still,” he snaps, yanking your head around to get a closer look, as if he can somehow seal the cut by staring really hard at it. You elbow him, and he finally steps aside with a huff. 

“Your patrons are the worst,” you say. He shrugs.

“You’ve never seen my work,” he says, and has the gall to look offended at your horrified expression. He rolls his eyes (or at least the one eye you can see through the mask), leaning back on the wooden seat, not at all bothered by the corpse lying only a few feet away.

“Perhaps a short break,” he says. “Even the most _dedicated_ artist needs some respite. Have I ever told you about my travels?” 

He pats the seat next to him, and you really should leave. You really, really should leave. But you sigh, sit down, and let him perform his theatrical monologue to his one-person audience until nightfall. 

\---

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CONTEXT:
> 
> Jhin is supposedly a serial killer with a huge hard-on for the performing arts! Here are a couple of things that I personally like about him:
> 
> \- he hates symmetry because it's noT BEauTIFUl and therefore he covers his (im assuming) symmetrical face with? huh? whats that? why is your mask also perfectly symmetrical
> 
> \- he is SUPER into perfection and when he drops his gun while trying to do a Cool Twirl with it he will go "perfection- *drops gun* GRRGHGJDGHGODSDJGDGJ" and then pretend it never happened
> 
> \---
> 
> also kind of curious, would you react differently? I know this is a self-insert story collection but we're not all as stupid as reader-chan right LMAO


	8. Jhin | Epilogue (E)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> here i am to write all the explicit follow-ups no one asked for 
> 
> thank you again for following along with these!! I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed hitting the keyboard with my eyes closed

The longer you spend with him, the more certain you are that he’s just perpetually insane. 

“You just don’t understand my art,” he says, spinning his murder gun with a flourish. 

Yes. You will never understand why he feels the need to rearrange other people’s faces. You’re not the crazy person here. Who’s to say the voices in his beautiful mind aren’t going to suddenly tell him to rearrange you?

“Your face is far too pedestrian for my theatre. Too _uninspiring,”_ he says, looking you over pityingly. You put your pedestrian, uninspiring face in your hands and try not to scream. 

\---

In the city, the stories of the so-called golden demon are coming up less and less. 

“Perhaps he’s moved on,” says the guard at the gate, and you wish you could share his sense of optimism.

“Do you _want_ me to move on, my dear?” he says, clasping a hand to his chest. “Do you feel nothing for our camaraderie, our shared experiences, our bond, forged despite your complete lack of talent or appreciation for the performing arts-”

You notice you spend a lot more time grinding your teeth lately. They say it’s a sign of stress. It’s a mystery what could have caused it. 

\---

At the very least, he’s not murdering anyone while he’s with you. Apparently his job here came to a rather abrupt end.

“That particular patron is...well,” he says, and you look over at the spot where, only a few weeks ago, a corpse lay. 

“Sorry,” you say, even though you are not sorry at all, and maybe he should consider making artwork out of all his other bloodthirsty clients instead of hapless people on the street. 

He waves a hand. “All relationships end. Some sooner than others. You wouldn’t happen to have a production in your collection of shows that comes in a sequence, would you? Perhaps a series of four?”

\---

“This is not _quite_ what I meant,” he says in a thin, strangled voice, as Toy Story 3 comes to a close. 

You cue up the sequel. It’s not your fault he has a complete lack of appreciation for the performing arts.

\---

Your rather unusual arrangement could only have lasted so long, and the next time you walk into the church, you realize it’s come to an abrupt end. 

“Please don’t move in any further,” says the guard at the entrance, and when you peer over your shoulder you see that the inside is swarming with people, tearing the entire building up and looking for...you can probably guess what they’re looking for. 

“A civilian?” someone says, and you turn to see a tall, slim, elegant woman looking down at you.

“I got lost,” you say, and “Could you point me in the direction of the city,” because you’ve lived long enough in this world to know never, ever, ever to trust tall, slim, elegant people. When she walks, you hear a strange, metallic chime, and when you look down, you see that she’s replaced both her legs with steel. 

She moves to gesture to the right path, and it’s only then that you see the pool of blood in the center of the aisle. 

\---

You look everywhere. You backtrack across all the roads you’ve seen on the way to the church, running past dilapidated houses and climbing over fences and gates, but there’s no sign of him at all- and anyway, if anyone was going to be able to find him, it’d be the elegant, pretty, dangerous-looking lady from before and her gazillion guards, not you. 

Maybe he’s dead. It might not be such a bad thing. When did you start to consider it a bad thing? 

\---

It’s evening by the time you walk back through the city gates. The guards nod to you, used to seeing you wander in and out with regularity. Your mind is still trying to process what to do now - he’s been a major part of your life for the last few months, and now he’s most probably dead, so what do you do? Move? Start travelling again? Hold an impromptu funeral for the serial killer whose corpse is almost certainly lying in a ditch somewhere-

“Perhaps you could wait until I actually die before you bury me,” a voice says, and it’s a miracle you manage not to scream at the bloody hand that’s suddenly gripping your arm. 

You peer into the shadows where he’s standing, and _wow._ They really did a number on him. You don’t really want to know how many stab wounds his cloak (or whatever remains of it) is hiding. 

“Would you mind terribly if I asked you for a favor-” he says, but you freeze.

Running footsteps. The sounds of voices. And the cool, slow clinking of metal legs on cobblestone.

You grab his arm and start running. 

\---

“My mask! _I need my mask,”_ he snarls, trying to stop you and pull you back, but you drag him behind you the entire way back to your room at the inn, scrambling in through the back entrance and praying no one sees you. 

He’s freaking out the _entire fucking time,_ and the one time you try to look back at him he shoves your head back to face the front, clutching at his face with his other hand like he’s playing the titular role in The Phantom of the Opera while on, like, just _all the drugs in the world._

You finally, finally reach your room, kick in the door, and drag him in with you. Snatching a towel up from the wooden chair, you throw it over his head to cover his face, and he finally starts to calm down. 

Well. Kind of. With half his costume missing and the rest of it torn to shreds, he just looks like someone who’s about to happily murder everyone in sight. You try not to think about how the only person in sight right now is you. 

You dig through the few clothes you have, but he’s too tall to fit anything, so he’s just going to have to wear his stupid serial killer costume while you try and make him not bleed to death-

A knock on the door. 

“Miss? I heard noises,” says the innkeeper’s daughter, and “There are soldiers I’ve never seen in the city before,” and “Are you okay?”

He growls, and if you don’t do something the innkeeper’s daughter, and probably you along with her, are going to end up in a pile of organs on the floor. You grab his bloody cloak, tear it off, and toss it in the corner of the room along with his armor and his gun. 

The door handle turns, and you cannot put into words how much you regret not locking it when you barged in a few seconds ago. What can you do? Shove him in the closet? No space. Under the bed? Even less space. Out the window? Hmm-

He snarls. _Fine._ You drag him over to the bed, throw the towel to the side, and jam his face into the crook of your neck. 

“Miss, please say someth-” 

The girl pops her head through the gap in the door and immediately flushes red. It’s worked. Your shitty approximation of “in the middle of having sex so please fuck off” has worked. 

Or not. My god. She’s still there, and now she looks even more interested. You wave her desperately away, and she blinks like she’s been stunned, still clutching on to the wooden door. 

A growl. His hands fist in your shirt, dragging you even closer.

“We’re busy. _Get out,”_ he says, in a suddenly perfect imitation of the drawling accent the people in this city have. 

She slams the door closed with a high-pitched “Eep”, and you can hear footsteps hurrying away. You heave a sigh of relief and go to lock the door. When you turn back, he’s got the towel over his head again, and it takes physical effort to stop yourself from rolling your eyes. 

“Your room is just tragic,” he says, even though he’s the one ruining your bedsheets with all that blood.

\---

It takes a while to help him patch himself up, and even longer to change the sheets, but finally you have your room back to a semblance of its former cleanliness. 

Well. He may be cleaner now, but he’s no less injured than before. 

“Just flesh wounds, my dear, don’t you worry,” he says. You let him have the bed; you'll just go drink your problems away at the bar, just in case that lady and her guards come calling. You'd rather not be here if they do. 

\---

It’s many hours past midnight before you realize that if the lady and her guards _do_ come calling, you’ve literally left him there to die. 

You rush back, opening the door as quietly as you can, trying to control your breathing, just in case you’re not alone and there’s maybe fifteen guards just waiting to ambush- no. The room is silent. No light, no movement, no sound. In fact, it’s a little too silent. You walk to the bed, and he’s still there, sleeping- is he sleeping? You listen for breathing, trying to see if the blankets rise and fall as he breathes, and try to tamp down the growing panic when you can’t sense anything. You grab at the blankets, reaching for his neck to check for a pulse, the last thing you need is a literal corpse in your room- 

Your vision shifts, dizzyingly fast, and in an instant you’re on your back, pressed against the bed. You look up on instinct, but he’s laid himself flat out over you, hiding his face against your neck again. 

“You lack subtlety, my darling,” he says. “I could hear you from the hallway.”

 _And he thought it’d be funny to play dead?_ You jam your knee into his side, and he rolls aside, wheezing with a combination of pain and laughter. You will never understand this clown. You roll your eyes and sit up, ready to go back to the tavern and back to being blindingly drunk, but he holds on to your sleeve.

“Stay,” he says, reaching over from behind and wrapping an arm around your waist. You feel the arm for any hidden knives. 

“Must you be so suspicious? It wounds the soul,” he says, pulling you slowly back onto the bed. 

You give up. You’re tired. It’s been a hell of a day. You slump down beside him on the mattress and stare at the ceiling, the window, anywhere but his stupid face. What’s his hang-up about it, anyway?

“I loathe it,” he says. “I loathe the very sight of it. The mere thought of people looking at it. You’d hate it,” he adds, almost as an afterthought. Just in case you were thinking of looking.

“Wouldn’t hate your face. Just your personality,” you say, and you’re so close you can actually feel him shake as he laughs. 

\---

You don’t know when you fell asleep, but you’re woken up by footsteps outside your door. You bolt up, panicking, you don’t remember if you locked the door last night.

 _“Mmgh,”_ he says, as you shove his head against your neck on pure instinct. 

A pause. Silence. The footsteps come to a stop, and the silence stretches for so long you start to think you might have misheard- 

A breath. The faintest scrape of teeth against your throat. 

"Hmm," he says, almost to himself, and then suddenly there's a sting as he bites down, sucking hard enough to bruise. 

You gasp. Someone outside the door gasps. God damn it. You're finding another inn _today._

"It seems we have an audience," he says, so close you can feel his mouth move as he speaks. 

"I could go deal with her. Or," he breathes, “We could just put on a show-” 

You grab the nearest thing to you, a wooden washing bowl, and hurl it at the door. It bounces off with a _thud,_ and you can hear from the hurried footsteps that it worked. 

He sighs. “Not a single spark of dramatic flair in you. Not one.” 

He makes to move away, but your body moves before your mind can catch up, grabbing his shoulders and holding him in place. 

A pause. A long, long pause. 

"A performance doesn't always require an audience," he says, and you can just _hear_ his smile as he wraps his arms around your waist to lift you up. You hope the theater metaphors aren't going to be a constant thing. 

He shifts you around until you're face down on the bed, leaning over you. You feel him smooth a hand over your shoulders, down your back, feeling the muscles, and you try not to think about art and murder and knives. 

A pause as he shifts, lifting your clothes to access more skin, and suddenly his mouth is trailing down the back of your neck, down your back, and you arch into it when he scrapes his teeth across the muscles. His hands splay across your waist, sliding down and along your thighs. 

You try not to shiver as one hand moves between your legs, circling until it finds its target, but you can’t stop the gasp you make when he presses down. 

He’s murmuring in your ear, pointless things like _that’s it, darling,_ and _you sound so good_ and _just let me, this performance will be the most-_

“This performance,” you say, choking into the pillow. _“This performance?”_

He sighs, running one hand up your side. “Will even a _little_ drama kill you, my dear?” 

Fine. Fine. You can play along. You close your eyes and concentrate, trying to recall the most dramatic, theatrical lines you can remember, and you’re mouthing them to yourself, trying to drag them from your memory, _Look, I am not laughing now, crying, crying for you, Christine, who have torn off my mask and who therefore can never leave me again-_

A vibration. He’s laughing, _the absolute clown._

“That is not _quite_ what I was hoping for,” he says, and that is just rude. _Rude._ You’re trying to give him drama, give him theatrics, give him performance-

“I’ve changed my mind,” he gasps, choking back another laugh. “Nothing. Give me nothing.”

You’re about to tell him exactly where he can shove his stupid, pretentious face when he bends down again, pressing kisses into your shoulder with a mouth that’s still trembling with laughter. One arm snakes around your waist to hold you still, and the other hand- well, your mind might have been busy being offended, but your body is ready to pick up right where you left off. 

You bury your face in the pillow when he slips a finger inside, curving it carefully, and when he finds the spot he's looking for you try very, very hard not to make a sound, just to spite him. 

"Like I said, my dear," he says, and suddenly there are two fingers inside you, pressing hard enough to set your nerves on fire, "You lack subtlety." 

You reach back to jab him, but he just catches your hand, pressing a kiss to your palm, and pushes your arm behind your back, and it's really a testament to his artistic endeavors that he can multi-task so well. Or something. You're having enough trouble just remembering to breathe. Why choose murder when he's apparently fully capable of taking someone apart just like this? 

Slowly, his fingers slip out, skimming over the sensitive skin, and you can hear the rustle of cloth as he unbuckles. All too quickly he's back over you, murmuring something, probably a question, but you're too busy trying to catch your breath that you just nod. He pushes in, fast enough that you still feel the stretch, and breathing? What breathing? 

You push your face into the pillow as he starts to move, the slow friction making your head spin. He uses his now-freed hands to drag you back, closer, flush against him so he can rock into you. One hand cups your cheek for a second before you feel fingers push into your mouth, effectively stopping you from staying quiet. 

"That's it, darling," he breathes, "I do love-" and in that second you decide that if he says anything, anything at all about music or theater, you will take his gun and make blood-spattered art out of the both of you. 

He bends in half over you, shaking with badly-controlled laughter, and you realize you've been talking out loud. You reach for the gun. 

"I apologize," he says, still clearly smiling, "I do apologize." He buries his face in the crook of your shoulder. One hand slips back down between your legs, rubbing, while he thrusts up into you, and wounded pride aside, you're not going to last very much longer. 

"Could you," he says, panting. "Could you close your eyes for me?" 

A bit much to ask when you're putting all your focus into just breathing, but you do it. He tilts your head up, _oh,_ and you suppose even though you've already moved far past the kissing point, there's no harm in going back and checking that box. 

You're not sure what tips you over the edge, but he kisses you as you claw the sheets and shudder through it and follows you almost immediately, biting your neck hard enough to draw blood. 

\---

You buy a generic, mass-produced opera mask for him, and even though he eyes it with disdain and makes all sorts of snide complaints about its quality and lack of any artistic merit, at least he doesn't have to keep that towel over his head anymore. 

He watches you pack your things, haphazardly tossing what few belongings you have into your bag. 

"Growing bored of the city, my darling?" he says. 

You nod. Less of that, more of avoiding the scary lady and her scary friends, but close enough. 

He stretches out, testing his injuries. "I was thinking of continuing my travels, myself," he says. "My. Such a coincidence." 

You stare. The last thing you need is a serial killer following you around. This is exactly why you're leaving the city in the first place. 

“Oh, you focus so much on trivial things,” he says, waving a hand casually. “You will hardly notice my presence. I will keep my performances...mm. Small-scale.”

He sits himself down next to you, humming as he cleans his rifle, and you put your face in your hands and try not to scream. 

\---

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “Know that it is a corpse who loves you and adores you and will never, never leave you!... Look, I am not laughing now, crying, crying for you, Christine, who have torn off my mask and who therefore can never leave me again!... Oh, mad Christine, who wanted to see me!”  
> ― Gaston Leroux, The Phantom of the Opera
> 
> \---
> 
> Jhin's story is done! Thank you for joining me in my deep dive of disappointment, where I find out that I cannot write even one sex scene without putting something stupid inside, not even if it's for psychopathic thespian serial killers


	9. Jhin | Epilogue 2 (E)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 𝒯𝑜 𝓉𝒽𝑒 𝒶𝓃𝑜𝓃 𝓌𝒽𝑜 𝓇𝑒𝓆𝓊𝑒𝓈𝓉𝑒𝒹 𝒥𝒽𝒾𝓃 𝒸𝒽𝒶𝓅𝓉𝑒𝓇 𝟥 𝑒𝓋𝑒𝓃 𝓉𝒽𝑜𝓊𝑔𝒽 𝒸𝒽𝒶𝓅𝓉𝑒𝓇 𝟤 𝓈𝒶𝒾𝒹 "𝑒𝓅𝒾𝓁𝑜𝑔𝓊𝑒":
> 
> My friend, I hope this letter finds you in good health. I admit that your earnest request has left me at a loss, unexpected as it is-- but do not take my delay in response as denial, for I have not forgotten it. No, the opposite, I cannot help but think on it; and you must understand, words of love and adoration do not come easy when the most fervent desire of my soul is to burn this man to the ground and watch his ashes be taken by the wind. All night I have paced my floor, trying to decide if such a thing is possible. Nevertheless, I have endeavored to fulfil your wishes, and with regards to the object of your affection, I can only say that I differ in opinion.
> 
> \---
> 
> fuck this guy is what im saying

It’s a different sort of affliction, being trailed by a serial killer. 

At the very least, he’s not out to kill  _ you. _ Probably. Maybe. 

“You wound me with your suspicion,” he says mournfully, and it’s honestly a testament to his acting ability that he can make it sound even a little convincing.

\---

You end up doing your best to keep him distracted, from shows to musicals to music to just outright threatening to never entertain him again, because anything is better than knowing he’s running around waving his giant rifle like a magic wand and killing people left and right. 

“An artist has to  _ create art, _ my dear,” he says, “Otherwise they would not be an artist at all.”

Well, does he have to use  _ living people _ to create his art? There has never been a time when you wished this world had the full glory of special effects than now- wait.

“Don’t you have magic?” you ask.

He inclines his head, peering quizzically at you through the mask. 

“Can’t you use your magic to make fake corpses?” you say, displaying an image of one of the bodies in one of the many, many crime/thriller shows you’ve watched. 

A pause. 

“I’ve never tried anything even close,” he says, but at the very least, he doesn't sound… uninterested. 

\---

You load up the few documentaries and behind-the-scenes shows about gore and horror prop creation that you have, and hope for the best.

\---

No matter how much you try to keep an eye on him, he has his work and you have yours, and your two lives are very, very separate. Days, sometimes weeks go by without meeting, and it’s easy to get distracted with your own clients. 

Whenever you work, you try not to think about whether he’s busy with performances of his own. At least he never tells you about them, and you never ask.

\---

The theatre you’re invited to this time is  _ gorgeous. _ Towering ceilings, huge windows, flowers over every aisle, enough seats for hundreds of people. The director asked you to sit among the audience to really get a feel of when to put on which special effect, and so you try to dress like everyone else there. Fancy, flowing clothes, layers of jewelry, everything so colorful it makes your eyes hurt a little if you stare too long at any one spot. 

You settle in your seat as the curtains are drawn across the windows and the theatre grows dark, preparing to send out the billows of smoke that should accompany the overture. 

The first hum of music starts, the choir starts to sing, and-

There is already smoke at your feet. 

The crowd murmurs, impressed, but all you can feel is the growing sense of wrongness, and you will refund your client later, but right now you just want to leave this place. 

A scream. A burst of purple smoke. You leap out of your chair, scrambling over the other guests to get to the aisle, but just as you reach the end of the row of seats the theatre is plunged into complete darkness.

More screams. Hysterical sobbing. And one by one, explosions, the sharp  _ clack-clack _ of metal shrapnel being sent flying in every direction. You stand, shocked for just a second, and underneath the cacophony you can hear the faint, delicate strains of a piano.

That fucker.  _ That lunatic.  _ You’re going to shoot him in the head with his own rifle. 

Well- you are, if the explosions he’s clearly laid in advance don’t kill you first. The doors have been very obviously blocked,so you push your way through the screaming crowds, trying to find another exit, ignoring the spotlight that shines, very, very clearly, on one person, in the middle of the stage. 

Leave first. Murder him later. 

A thunderous crash, and oh, you didn’t think you’d ever be happy to see them again, but if anyone can get him to leave his performance unfinished, it’s the tall, elegant, terrifying lady and her guards. 

They rush towards the stage, light pouring through the windows they broke getting in, and you turn to run, ignoring the shouts and gunfire from behind you. So close. So close to getting out, and- a shooting pain up your leg. You look down, trying to figure out if your leg got stuck in a chair, or some piece of furniture, and the moment you see the sharp metal teeth of the trap embedded in your leg, you know you’re as good as gone. 

You look around, trying to find someone to help you, but there’s nothing but pandemonium. The metal claws sink deeper, sending searing pain and fluorescent trails of magic...something...up your leg, and you spare a moment to consider the possibility of coming back as a vengeful spirit. At least he won’t be able to shoot you when you’re a ghost. 

You turn your head towards the stage, where he’s fending off guards and cackling like the madman he is, and suddenly he turns his head, just for a split second, freezing, looking right at you. Down at your leg. He swings his rifle, the rifle that hasn’t been pointed at you since that very first day you met, across his shoulder, and the loud crack of the bullet is enough to send you reeling- but you’re not dead. You’re not dead, and the trap has been shot to pieces, and when you look back the woman and her guards have taken the single second that he was distracted to surround the stage.

\---

The guard that carries you out of the theatre helps you dress your wounds and get you back to the main road, but won’t answer any of your questions about what happened to either the people in the theatre or the person trying to kill them. 

You think for a long time. A long, long time, about what exactly you’ve gotten yourself into, and whether now would be the opportune time to get out of it, and whether just pretending you never knew him would be the best thing to do. Then you just don’t think anymore, and head out to find one of those guards before you change your mind. 

\---

It’s not hard to find them. They’re the only ones out this late, still looking through the mess in the theatre. You wait, and when a few of them head off, you follow, projecting pure opaque blackness all around you- hopefully they won’t notice you if all you are is a black shadow. 

It works. They  _ don’t  _ notice you, and when you reach the building they’ve designated as their temporary quarters you slip in, projecting the image of a guard over yourself instead, and swiping up anything that looks remotely like a key. As long as you don’t talk, and the rest of them stay at a distance, and you don’t give yourself a heart attack thinking about what they’d do if they found out, you should be-

There he is. Those are some  _ really  _ dramatic-looking chains. Very appropriate. Maybe that’s why they left the mask on. 

He lifts his head when he hears your footsteps.

“Back again, inspector?” he says, cheerfully, politely, despite the frankly incredible amount of injuries, and chokes on his words when he sees you. He shouldn’t be able to see you. 

“You really have no talent for the performing arts, my darling,” he says, quietly, and you fish out the keys you’ve collected to look for the right one. 

There’s really only a few keys large and important-looking enough, and you find the one that fits the heavy lock just in time to hear other footsteps coming your way. 

“Give that to me,” he says, tilting his head at a chunk of loose rock in the corner of the cell. You snatch it up, and he puts his chained hands over it, muttering something, and when you see the glowing lines start to course through it, you know what he’s trying to do. 

The explosion is large, loud, and enough to turn the single set of footsteps into multiple, all running and shouting, but you’ve already managed to drag him out into the darkness.

\---

It’s a slow, painful trek back to the inn, and both of you aren’t exactly in the best of shape, but you make it. You’ve long since learned to appreciate anonymity. The people at  _ this  _ inn know how to mind their own business.

He shakes his head when you tap at the chains winding across his wrists and up his arms. “Magic. I assume they’ll lose their power soon enough.”

You collapse on the bed, and he...stays, standing right where he is. You’re not sure how he’s still on his feet with those injuries. 

“I was not aware your work brought you to the theatre,” he says, and as his eyes flick to the bandages on your leg he snarls, like just the sight of it makes his blood boil. 

Neither of you likes to discuss the topic of work with each other, which is what you suppose led to this fiasco, but right now you can’t decide what you want more- to sleep for five days straight, or to retrieve his rifle from wherever it is now and shoot him in the face with it. 

“The latter, my dear, the latter; it is far better to shoot me and be done with it,” he says, gasping out a laugh and stumbling to his knees. 

You look at him, and sigh, and get up to find the bandages.

\---

He’s no help at all, because his hands are still chained together with  _ magic, _ but you eventually get most of the wounds cleaned and wrapped up. 

He sighs, leaning against the wall. “It was supposed to be a magnificent performance. My  _ finest  _ performance. The last for a long, long time. One wants to go out with a bang, as they say.” 

His last one? This lunatic who only has bloody murder running through his otherwise empty head is going on hiatus? You’ll believe that when you see it.

“So callous,” he says, putting both hands to his chest. “Perhaps you should just shoot me and get it over with, the hole in my chest would be nothing compared to how you hurt me with your words-”

Then he doubles over coughing, and you can see blood drip from the bottom of his mask.

\---

You expected this, but expecting it makes it no less unpleasant. 

_ "I'm fine," _ he says, recoiling from you and backing up against the bed, determined to keep his mask on. You ignore him, just like you ignore the rest of your problems. Also, if he's going on an extended hiatus, does it even matter if people see his face? Is it possible, in any way, for this man to chill for even one second? 

"That's  _ not _ the point," he says, and he looks about two seconds away from actually trying to make a run for it. Idiots get treated like idiots, and so you reach across, knocking him back onto the bed. In the precious few seconds that he's disoriented, you yank the chains up and over his head, winding them around and hooking them under the bedpost. 

He flips out when he realizes what's happened, yanking at the chains like a madman and trying to throw you off him, but you ignore it and put all your concentration into prying off his mask. The clasps are intricate and ridiculous, and you're pretty sure you broke something, but it's off, and of course he's still wearing a cloth mask under it. Of course. It's like he  _ wants _ to choke to death. 

"Stop," he says, coughing, and you're glad the cloth is black so you don't have to see how much blood has already seeped through. You peel it off, starting from where it stops at his neck, and try very, very hard not to think about how wet it is. 

He's an absolute mess. His hair is damp and matted and there is just so much blood you can barely make out the rest of his face. You grab the washcloth out of its bowl and scrub, trying to wipe away most of it. He doesn't make it easy, growling and jerking his head away whenever you get close to his face, and you spend half the time considering if it would be really  _ that _ detrimental to his health if you just knock him out. Finally, finally you get most of the mess cleaned up, and by the time you're almost done he's run out of energy and reduced to just… glaring. At the wall. At the ceiling. Anywhere but your face. 

You swipe the cloth over one more time, just in case, and he groans, closing his eyes. 

"Don't  _ look."  _

You remember what he said before, the whole monologue about hating his face so much that he wants to kill anyone who even looks at it, but you're way past the point of worrying about that, and also he did promise not to kill you. You should be able to hold him accountable for at least one thing. 

You try to remember what you're supposed to do for a friend with what seems like a somewhat extreme case of dysmorphia, but none of the information you recall helps. Talk to him? He's long past the point of that. Offer to help? He's just going to tell you to put the mask back on. Therapy? Are you kidding?  _ You _ need therapy. 

_ Distract them _ is the very last piece of advice you can remember, and if nothing else, you can at least manage that.

He stiffens when you kiss him, just completely freezes in place, and for a second you wonder if you've made some kind of terrible mistake, but when you pull back, he gasps- a short, sharp inhale like he forgot to breathe, finally looking at you. 

“What,” he says, but when you kiss him again he groans, arms going slack in their chains. You tilt his head and lick into his mouth and taste blood. 

He flinches when you lick across a cut on the inside of his cheek, and his hips jerk, just for a split second, and  _ of course this man is into pain. Of course. _ No wonder he’s always trying to get you to shoot him. Is that why he keeps waving that stupid gun around? Maybe you  _ should  _ shoot him, but then he might like it, and that’s not the type of reinforcement you want to be giving him right now.

A gasp, a shaky breath, and when you look down to check on him you realize he’s laughing.

“Do whatever you want, my darling,” he says. “How could I say no to you?” 

He was saying ‘no’  _ just fine _ a few minutes ago, but at least this tactic of distraction is working and he’s back to his regular annoying speech pattern, and so you run your hand up through his hair and pull, scraping your teeth against the bared skin on his neck, and then across the line of his clenched jaw. 

He's panting, fists clenching and unclenching at nothing, and when you slide your hand down and press on the bandages at his waist, his whole body  _ jerks, _ arching up. He's already hard, you can feel it where it's pressing against you, so you slip your hand down and draw it out, hot and leaking before you've even touched it. This man has issues, even more than what you're already aware of. His issues have issues. You should just leave and find a new friend, one who doesn’t run around in wearing, like, two masks at once, and whose goal in life isn't to go murder every living human in existence and/or die from autoasphyxiation or something. 

“You do know how to make a man feel appreciated,” he says, in between breaths, and as you look at him you think how odd it is to actually be able to see him laugh. 

He blinks at you, smile fading, and did he just remember he’s not wearing a mask? You push your hand against his cheek and he turns his head into it, mumbling something that you can’t quite make out, but it doesn’t matter. Sure, he might not like his face, but there are benefits to not covering your face, and you prove it by shoving your tongue down his throat again. 

It’s not the best angle but neither of you seem to care, and anyway you’re too busy trying to take your goddamn clothes off to focus too much, anyway. You end up with cloth jammed around your thighs, tight and uncomfortable and probably cutting off blood circulation to your lower extremities, but it’s good enough. He  _ shouts  _ when you fuck him, and you clamp your hand over his mouth in a panic, because the people in this inn might mind their own business, but everyone has a limit. 

He’s staring at you, eyes glazed, chest heaving, and if this entire day has been any indication, nothing will go as planned and so you might as well do what you want. You draw yourself back up and drop down again, burying him inside you to the hilt, over and over until you’re both breathless. He’s still talking, mumbling an endless stream of incoherent nonsense, and when you slam yourself down one more time he shudders, his whole body trembling, gasping for breath. 

You take your hand off his mouth and watch him catch his breath, stroking your hand across his cheek, when you realize that any chains, magic or otherwise, have worn off. How long have they been gone? You didn’t pay attention, and apparently neither did he, because he’s also only just noticing. He brings his hands down, slowly, stretching to get the blood flow back, and you prepare yourself to tackle him if he tries to go for that fucking mask again-

He surges upward, knocking you off-balance, and you’re just about ready to really commit and knock this moron unconscious when he pushes you back onto the bed, and apparently you really underestimated the appeal of making out, because he didn’t even  _ look  _ at his mask. 

He supports your weight with one hand and drags his other hand down, across your stomach and over your thighs and shoves two fingers inside, and you have to commend his muscle memory because after all that he still knows exactly where to press and what angle will make you lose the ability to think straight. 

You try to say something, but it’s a little difficult with him doing his level best to fuse your mouths together forever, or something, and anyway his fingers are so distracting you’re not sure you remember how to form words, so you just fling your hands around his neck and hang on. 

He pulls his head away just long enough to sink his teeth into your neck, licking across the bite mark, and it’s honestly a miracle you still have the decorum not to scream too loudly when you come. 

\---

He still insists on hiding his face, but at least this time it’s in the side of your neck, and he doesn’t go out of his mind if you accidentally look. 

“I still loathe it,” he says, and if he doesn’t want to talk about it, it’s fine. You have more pressing issues to worry about, like getting the hell out of this city before the guards start scouring every single building looking for him. 

“No one will even notice me without the mask,” he says (again, into your neck). “We can leave in the morning.”

_ We  _ are not leaving.  _ We  _ implies that the two of you are together, and the last time you were together you almost got exploded by one of his insane traps. 

He sighs, mumbling against your skin, and you can only make out  _ hiatus  _ and  _ careful  _ and  _ I’m sorry. _

“Come with me,” he says. “My darling. Please.”

You drag one hand over your face. You can practically feel what little common sense you had left evaporating.

“Hiatus?” you say. 

“If you come with me,” he says, “If not,  _ ah,  _ I feel it already, the beauty in carnage, the ecstasy of opening night, the muses, they call to me- Oh, you don’t want to choke me, my dear, what if I like it-”

You wrench your hands away from his throat and he throws back his head, laughing, all the more infuriating for the fact that you can see him now. 

You thump your head back on the pillow, and he shifts over to mold himself to your side, murmuring “Well?” against your neck. 

“We can leave in the morning,” you say begrudgingly, and the smile against your skin is exasperating, but you can’t seem to bring yourself to care. 

\---

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ngl wouldve shot him in the face


	10. Twisted Fate

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> there were a couple of requests for TF! Also I have a fic trade with MirrorDaltokki and they asked for this guy too, so i get to disappoint MULTIPLE people at once and isnt that what life is all about?
> 
> a lil bit of context is in the end notes for people who are fortunate enough not to know this fool
> 
> AS USUAL thank you so much for the comments!! please feel free to leave reqs, I just got one for singed and really if I can write him I can write anyone

The first thing you feel is the hard impact of the water, and then you’re sinking down into cold, inky blackness. You don’t know what’s going on or what eldritch horror you ended up in, but at the very least, you know how to swim. You drag yourself upwards, towards where there’s the barest indication of light at the surface, and instinctively grab the hands that reach out to haul you out of the water and onto their boat. 

The people who helped you up tell you in their slow, drawling accents that no, they’ve never heard of your country, and no, this isn’t anywhere close to it, wherever it may be; and as confused as you are, they did save you from the river, so you try your best to take it all in stride.

\---

Your hosts, who you find out later on actually live on the boats that they sail down the river, let you accompany them to their next stop. It’s a colorful, confusing few days, but at the very least you share their language, if not their way of life. 

You pick up the odd dance move and a card trick or two just by watching them. It’s like they never sleep, jumping from boat to boat, their constant travel reminding you of the nomadic tribes you’ve read about online. 

“Like this,” says the woman beside you, shuffling her deck of poker cards. You try to imitate her, flicking through the cards, but it’s not quite the same, you’re never going to get this trick down.

“Marvelous!” she says, beaming, and you stare at the ace that’s in your hands, the one that you could have sworn was across the table. 

\---

You practise when no one’s paying attention, and after a while you figure out that anything you can physically lift, you can swap with something else. Jewelry. Chairs. Living things. The river now has a few less fish and a few more pebbles. 

“How’d you catch those?!” someone says, and you just pass them the bucket of fish to cook up. 

\---

The river nomads drop you off at the busiest, darkest, most pirates-of-the-caribbean port you’ve ever seen. All around you people shove against each other, calling out their wares, haggling for a spot in the marketplace, wandering around in drunken stupors, and generally doing what you’d expect pirates to do. 

The river-people assure you that this is the largest, most populated port on their route, and if you can find anyone to help you get home, it’s here. It looks less like a place to get help and more like a place to get shanked; but it’s not like you can leech off them forever, so you step off the boat and onto the wobbly wooden slats of the pier. 

\---

The city itself is as dark and as fraught with crime as you’d expect. A sort of run-down, vice-filled version of the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, with guns and swords that actually work. 

Luckily for you, you don’t have weapons, tattoos, or voluptuous breasts, and with your completely, perfectly average appearance, absolutely no-one pays any attention to you. You try to take it as a good thing. 

\---

A living is actually not that hard to make. Your new talent might be kind of unconventional, but everyone needs to eat, and what sells better in a sea port than fish? 

You do consider some of the other, more dubious ways to use your newfound skill— at least until you see the corpses that turn up on an almost-daily basis, floating face-down in the canals. Maybe you'll just stick to fish. 

It's an odd city, and the people in it are equally odd, but no one has tried to kill you so far, and so this is how you end up spending your time. Your return on investment is  _ amazing _ considering you have to expend exactly zero effort actually catching anything, and soon enough, you've moved out of the inn you've been staying at and got your own boat, and with it you can venture even farther out to sea, your small vessel bobbing unnoticed among the much larger, much more imposing ships. With wider waters comes even stranger, even more valuable sea creatures, odd little aquatic animals that glint and sparkle as they speed through the water, too fast for humans to catch. 

Well, too fast for normal humans to catch. Suckers. Anyway, the point is that you're doing pretty great for yourself, which is why you suppose the universe chooses that exact moment to launch a corpse into your boat. 

\---

It's definitely a corpse. You can tell, because you jabbed it with a stick, like, fifteen times, just to make sure. You consider just tipping it out into the ocean, they do practice burials-at-sea here, but it seems just a tad callous. Maybe later. Once you've checked the body for valuables. 

A pack of cards. Golden cufflinks. And a hat. You rifle through his soggy jacket, looking for anything else, but that's about it. You toss the valuables to the side, and you're still thinking of how to roll him off, so you don't notice the hand clutching your sleeve for a few seconds. Just long enough to really give you that full heart attack experience that you never knew you needed. 

"Envy," says the corpse, and you wrench your hand away, backing up to the other side of the boat-

"Envy," he groans again, reaching out for something. "Where is she?" 

You pause. Envy's a  _ person.  _ Maybe his wife, or his daughter or something, and you crawl back across to listen. If it's a last message, you'd be a dick not to pass it on before you toss him off the boat—

_ "My hat," _ he says, stretching out his hand, and it's a testament to your altruism that you don't just throw him overboard right then and there. 

\---

"You really gave your hat a name?" 

"You really tried to toss me overboard?" 

If you’re being honest, his seems like the more serious crime, but you suppose if he really had to give his hat a name, Envy isn't the very worst one he could've picked. 

You let him tag along until you head back to port. The boat-people took care of you, you should really pay it forward, and for some reason he reminds you of them. Maybe it's the accent. 

You don't want to "fish" while he's watching, so there's nothing to do but make smalltalk. Apparently he got tossed off another boat, one of the much bigger ones surrounding yours, for trying to scam its passengers in card games. 

"Baseless accusations. A man such as myself would  _ never  _ stoop to such dishonorable means," he declares, but you know a scam artist when you see one. Still, he’s not trying to scam you, so it’s pleasant enough to listen to him go on about how he got onto that boat in the first place, the faces of the rich and affluent turning ugly after he’d had one too many winning hands, the inevitable tossing of the card swindler off-board. 

He’s still talking by the time you pull into port, another fantastic and completely unbelievable story about an escape from prison where he literally teleported out of his jail cell. 

“Now, how can you say that?” he says, putting a hand over his heart and looking like you slandered his entire family when all you said was  _ that seems unlikely.  _ “Give a man a chance.”

Giving a man a chance apparently involves going to the nearest tavern, getting inordinately drunk, and listening to him spin ever-wilder, ever-more-unbelievable tales- but this time you’re actually inebriated enough to believe him, so maybe it all worked out in the end. 

\---

You run into him every once in a while, usually at the port, where he’ll slink out from a alleyway or some other suspicious corner, tipping his hat and asking about your day in that amiable, laid-back way, saying that he knows about a new bar down by the docks, or up near the more expensive harbor. 

You know it’s just because he’s broke in-between scams and hoping to get a free meal out of it, but you don’t really mind. His stories are fun to listen to- and it’s not like you don’t earn enough gold to pay for the food. 

Slowly, before you really notice it, your rare, off-chance meetings have evolved into weekly affairs. Sometimes in taverns, sometimes by the docks, sometimes up on the crumbling bridge overhanging the city, but you always end up running into each other sooner or later. 

“Pick a card, any card,” he says one evening, leaning against the wooden facade of some old, long-closed butcher’s shop. 

You pick one out and turn it over. It’s gold. Poker cards aren’t supposed to be gold. You need to find yourself a less extra friend. 

“Well, well,” he says, shuffling the rest of the deck and returning it to his coat pocket. “Aren’t you lucky.” 

You hold the card out. 

“Keep it,” he says, shaking his head. “Lucky charm.”

It looks less like a lucky charm and more like a souvenir from the casino uptown, but okay. It’s kind of nice. You didn’t know you were on gifting terms, but then you think about how many free meals he’s skimmed off you, and huh. Maybe you should be getting the rest of that deck, too. 

\---

Sometimes he plays his scams- sorry, his card tricks- in the taverns. He always asks you to keep a distance, pretend to be just another spectator, and you figure out why on the very first game. 

“You tricked me,” says the man across the table, eyes bulging, staring wide-eyed at the winning hand on the opposite side of the table, gripping his fur coat with white-knuckled fists and already motioning to his lackeys behind him. 

“Never,” he says, gathering up his winnings in one smooth motion. “I would  _ never, _ sir. It’s just the luck of the draw.” 

He tips his hat, and the man’s bodyguards reach for him- and he’s gone. Vanished, right into thin air, though you could have sworn you weren’t looking away for even one second.

When you leave the tavern, he steps out of the shadows beside you. You take a second to really admire the face of such an incredibly shameless cheat.

“Cheatin's just a fancy word for winnin’,” he says, holding out his arm. “Now, what say we get ourselves some real food?”

\---

No matter how long you watch him for, you can never figure out how he’s doing his card tricks. Some sleight of hand? Actual magic? You can’t make sense of it, and he knows it. Once in a while, your eyes meet across whatever dimly-lit bar you’re in, and he’ll smile that smug, sly smile. 

“What are you smiling about?” says the woman across from him, eyeing his hand.

“Nothin’, ma’am. Nothin’ at all,” he says, and you know that evening is going to end in yet another “unexpected” win. 

\---

It’s already a miracle that his luck lasted as long as it did, so you’re not surprised when one evening, the game of chance turns into an all-out brawl. Bounty-hunters are a thing in this world, and your friend has got  _ quite  _ the bounty on his head. One second he’s laying cards on the table, and the next there are people bursting into the room, waving their ridiculously large firearms, and the entire bar devolves into chaos. 

You slip out, and he’s there as usual, waiting in the shadows, but before you can take another step someone grabs you by the throat. 

“You his new partner?” one of the bounty hunters says, and  _ what?  _ You try to slip out, but she’s got you in a choke-hold, and when you whip your head back around to look for him- he’s gone. Vanished. Disappeared, right into thin air, just like all the other times, except this time he left you behind.

\---

“Uh,” says the guard, down at the ramshackle building that counts as this part of the city’s holding cell. “You  _ sure  _ that’s his new partner?”

_ “Of course _ I’m sure-” she says, shaking you, but then pauses. Takes another look. Hesitates, just a little.

You smile blandly back at them, and for once you appreciate the inherent value of looking completely and perfectly average.

\---

They keep you in the holding cell, just in case he comes back for you. He does not.

“You know, this is exactly what he did to his old partner,” says the bounty hunter, bored out of her mind with guard duty and clearly trying to goad you into admitting some sort of partnership. She tells you all about his old friend, and how he just left him behind to rot in prison, and that’s what he’s doing to you, so isn’t that exactly why you should just  _ tell her where he is already? _

You shrug, and when she stomps out to complain to someone else, you swap the handcuffs with the jail key and let yourself out.

\---

You keep an eye out for him, but he doesn’t appear the next day, or the next, or the next, no matter how many dark alleys and rowdy taverns you walk past. 

\---

It’s not hard to fall back into your normal routine. Honestly, the sudden lack of barroom brawls in your life has only made you healthier. A month, two months pass by like this, and when you run into the bounty hunter again, it takes her an insultingly long time to recognize you.

“You!” she says, after a full minute of squinting at your face. “How did you get out back then- ugh, never mind.” She shakes her head. “You don’t even have any bounty.”

You buy her a few rounds of drinks, and she seems to have wholeheartedly forgiven you by the third beer.

“We got ‘im, you know,” she says, cheerfully. “We just caught ‘im! What an idiot, skulking around the docks like that…”

She goes on and on, about how much the bounty is and what she’s going to do with the money, but you’re too busy deciding if you should pay the holding cell another visit to really focus on the conversation.

\---

He looks  _ rough. _ Like he’s been living on the street since the last time you saw him. The chains only enhance the look.

“Hello,” you say, and his head snaps up, eyes wide.

“What’re you doin’ here,” he whispers, and “Get out, they’re gonna think you’re with me,  _ go on.”  _

You crouch down and wait. Seconds go by in silence. 

“Uh...I’m just venturin’ a guess here, but you aren’t waitin’ for me to do the disappearin’ act, are you?”

You nod. He sighs. 

“Outta cards,” he says, as if that makes any sense. You squint.

“I need my cards to do my magic,” he mutters, “And I’m all out.” 

You stand up to pat through your jacket, and he keeps on mumbling. 

“Never got to say this, but for what it’s worth-I’m sorry,” he says, looking away. “Didn’t mean to leave you back there, should’ve come back for you earlier. Should’ve apologised, should’ve done something, but I couldn’t even look you in the eye. Reckoned hangin’ around you’d make ‘em even more suspicious, but still, I...I...uh. Uhm. Are you listenin'? Pourin’ my heart out here, just sayin-” 

You hold up the gold card, and his face splits into a grin. 

\---

“Much obliged,” he says, once you’re both far, far away from the holding cell. 

“Apologize to your friend,” you say. “Why didn’t you apologize to your friend?”

"I  _ tried _ to break him out-" He sighs. “It’s a long story.” 

_ This clown. _ You walk off, and when you turn around to check, he isn’t following you- he’s just standing right where you left him, peering after you and looking ten different shades of guilty. It feels like you kicked a dog. A cowardly dog, wearing a really ugly hat, but still.

“You can tell me over dinner,” you call, and he brightens up immediately, hurrying over and holding out his arm.

“I know a great place,” he says, and honestly, any place is fine, as long as he keeps his cards to himself. 

\---

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SOME CONTEXT! Twisted Fate is a grifter and con artist who has magical card powers and uses them for stupid things like high-stakes gambling games that will almost inadvertently land him in prison
> 
> things Twisted Fate has done in canon:
> 
> \- run away while his friend got caught  
> \- try and fail to break him out of prison  
> \- give up immediately  
> \- rebrand himself from "Tobias" into "Twisted Fate" because he wanted a new start  
> \- do EXACTLY THE SAME THING he was doing before, just with a stupider name  
> \- name his hat Envy
> 
> this man cannot be redeemed is what im saying


	11. Twisted Fate | Epilogue (E)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the second part of my trade with @mirrordaltokki !! it's time to fuck Gambit i mean Twisted Fate

The story is just as long and just as unbelievable as all his other ones. 

_ “You left him in prison,” _ you say.

_ “I can’t just magic him to freedom,”  _ he says, and spends an excessive amount of time describing to you exactly how his card magic works. You’re not sure if sharing trade secrets with what can only be generously described as a new friend is the best course of action, but he just shrugs when you tell him that. 

“Owe you a fair bit more than that,” he says, and you don’t know how to deal with this sudden and uncomfortable sincerity. You buy him another drink.

\---

He doesn’t bring you around to the taverns any more, so you can never be sure if he’ll turn up the next day, or if some other bounty-hunter has finally gotten their lucky break.

“Layin’ low for now,” he says, hopping on board your boat with the cheerful confidence of someone who’s sure he’s not going to get kicked off. You kick him off, even if only for a minute, just to make a point. 

\---

You’d think a man who runs this many scams and has this much of a bounty on his head would spend all his waking moments in the shadows, hiding from bounty-hunters and law enforcement, but you forget one thing- this city’s entire population is apparently made up of people just as notorious, just as criminal, and so it turns out that he can walk the streets of the city in relative anonymity.

He apparently uses this relative anonymity to trail around you whenever you’re in the city, even more than he did before, and it’s gotten to the point where you’re not sure if he even has time to run his card tricks with all the time he spends following you around. 

“Card tricks? Now, why would I do somethin’ like that?” he says, grinning. “I’m layin’ low, just like I said.”

Your idea of ‘laying low’ doesn’t involve him trailing you around the city and inviting himself onto your boat, but okay. It’s still better than the gambling dens.

\---

Aside from all the pointless conversation and tall tales of adventure, he’s not very eager to talk about the rest of his life.

“My life? It ain’t nothin’ to interest someone like yourself,” he says. You keep pushing, though, and once in a while, when he’s very, very drunk or very, very tired, he’ll tell you his story in bits and pieces. It turns out he  _ is _ related to the river-people, and they left him behind when he was a young man, because-

“You ran away _ again?” _

“It was the first time!” he says, deflating a little. Yes, it was the first time, and apparently he hasn’t learnt a thing since then.

\---

In the small amount of free time you have between work and him following you around, you do your own research (you buy the bounty hunter a couple drinks and ask her for news), and apparently his friend is already out of prison, running his own equally-dubious heists across the city. It’s kind of ridiculous that they haven’t run into each other yet, but the city is vast, and the seas are even larger, and apparently everyone who’s capable of dealing with them is distracted with a building tension between the pirate captains that rule this place.

“Apologize to him,” you say.

“If he doesn’t blow my head off first,” he says, and you suppose that’s all you can really hope for. 

\---

“I’m gonna  _ blow your head off,” _ the man bellows, waving what can only be described as a cartoonishly large blunderbuss. 

_ “I said I was sorry,”  _ he howls, leaping over the anchor cable of the ship, the ship that apparently belongs to the city’s most formidable pirate and that is currently on just  _ so much fire.  _ You crouch behind a crate, trying to figure out how you ended up here when all you were planning to do was go out and grab some food. 

_ I found him, _ he’d said, holding out his arm,  _ You wanted me to apologize, so you’re comin’ along. _

Well. He did apologize. Too bad it had to be during a shootout on the city’s most infamous ship. 

The captains, the two pirate captains whose fight to the death is behind this entire catastrophe, are still distracted on the bow, trading gunfire and explosions and at one point  _ barrels of explosives. _ Meanwhile, him and his friend are having their own fight across the rest of the deck, which involves only slightly less gunfire, but a whole lot more shrieking.

“I went to the Locker ‘cause of you!” his friend screams, firing his giant gun with abandon and scattering buckshot everywhere. 

“I tried to break you out!” he screams back, sprinting across the deck, and you take a moment to wonder why he never thought to carry a gun with him. Cards can’t do  _ everything. _

The man with the shotgun trains his barrel, focused on his friend (ex-friend?), but he’s using a shotgun. Not even a shotgun, he’s using what looks to be the  _ very first iteration  _ of a shotgun, and his next shot goes wild. You barely have time to register the bullet heading straight for your face.

Someone hits you with a flying tackle, and the both of you go sprawling across the deck. The bullet embeds itself in the crate behind you, and when you look up he’s frantically checking to see if your head is still where it’s supposed to be. 

“What the hell, Fate,” says his friend, walking closer, stupefied. “Who’s this?”

“Fate” holds up his hands. “No one,” he says, “No one at all, Malcolm,” and “Can’t we talk this out? Ain’t no need to go shootin’ everyone, right?”

You point at him. “You can shoot him.”

_ “ _ _ Hey!” _

His friend narrows his eyes.

“He left me in jail,” you say.

_ “I did not-” _

“That’s  _ exactly  _ what he did to me!” the man says, crossing his arms. 

“He avoided me for two months,” you say.

“Try  _ ten years,” _ he says. You shake your head sympathetically, ignoring the wide-eyed, betrayed looks you’re getting from the only other person on deck. 

“So you want to shoot him,” you say. His friend nods.

“But the ship is on fire,” you say, and he frowns, considering.

“Maybe you could chase each other around after getting off the boat,” you say, and just as he’s nodding his head, the ship explodes.

\---

Your entire world tilts on its head, and you realize that the horrific creaking sound you hear is the ship literally breaking in half. The three of you slide wildly across the deck, scrambling for something to hold on to, but before you can grab at anything you lose your footing and go careening off the side of the boat.

Unpleasant as it is to get dunked into the icy water, you’re not too worried (if you can call “blind panic” not too worried), because any shrapnel that comes flying at you can be swapped away with the countless pieces of trash already floating in the bay. Then you hear a splash beside you, and you do panic, because you only have enough concentration to swap shrapnel coming for you. You can’t focus on two people at the same time. 

He makes a grab for you, sputtering something, but he’s immediately swept under by the huge waves from the explosion. You’re gripped by a sudden, horrible sense of fear- you’re not strong enough to drag him back above the water- but then there’s a third, much bigger splash, and after a second his friend re-emerges from the water, dragging the limp body of the man he was just trying to shoot with him.

“This moron  _ can’t swim,”  _ he says, and together the two of you manage to haul yourselves back to shore, pulling him in tow. 

\---

You buy the man a cigar, and let him rest on your boat (it’s superior in the fact that it’s not on fire and still in one piece), and he seems to be in a much more amicable mood by the time you hand him back his dry cloak. 

“What, he’s a kept man now?” he says, chuckling. “Never thought I’d see the day.”

“You got no sense of romance, Malcolm,” he croaks, hauling himself into a sitting position and coughing the last of the water out of his lungs.

_ “You _ ain’t get to talk,” says Malcolm, flicking his cigar ash at him. “Still got half a mind to shoot you in the face.”

You point to the shotgun, where it’s sitting, still dripping water and in dire need of repair, and he sighs. 

“‘Bout time to get outta Bilgewater,” he says, gesturing around him. “This place’s gonna go real bad real soon.”

He stands up, collects his gun, but just before he steps off the boat he turns his head. “Gonna shove off for Piltover. Better not see you pokin’ your sorry head in my business again.” And with those sweet, sweet parting words, he's gone. 

“That right there,” he says, once his friend is long out of earshot, “Was an invitation.”

It sounded more like a threat to you, but who knows how criminals handle their friendships? At least he didn’t end up getting shot in the head.

\---

He’s  _ insufferable  _ after that. The mix of nervous energy and excitement and relief is only tolerable in small amounts, and you’re happy for him, you really are, but if he hums that sea shanty  _ one more time _ you will hold his head underwater. 

He’s taken to dragging you around the stores uptown, pointing out where Piltover is on the map, telling you all about the  _ cultural center of the world _ and how all the greatest technological minds gather there, new crafts and cutting-edge inventions literally pouring out onto the street. You’re not sure why he’s telling you all of this, especially because you know the only thing he cares about is whether there are enough affluent people there to scam.

\---

“Care for a wager?” he says one evening, after he’s insinuated himself onto your boat for what has to be the hundredth time. 

No. You don’t particularly. But he flicks his cards up, fanning them out in his hand, letting them glow in the moonlight. 

“Just one game,” he says. “A fair game, swear on my honor.” 

Bold words coming from a man with no honor to speak of, but he looks particularly insistent. Fine. What kind of game?

“King’s game,” he says, spreading his hands. “Highest card wins. The king’s order is absolute.”

That sounds like the most suspicious game you’ve ever heard of, but he smiles, saying “Just  _ one  _ order,” and “Nothing untoward, I swear,” and “Scared of losin’?” and  _ oh my god, fine.  _ If he wants to play that badly, you can humor him. 

He shuffles the cards, splitting the deck into half and riffling it back together, making a show of it even though there are only two of you, and you only need to pick one card each. He slides five cards out, face-down on the table. 

“Pick a card, any card,” he says, grinning, and you know. You know he’s cheating. You know it, and he knows it, but he’s never asked you for a game before, and if he really wants to win so much, you can let him. Just this one time.

You pick the card, and know immediately that you’ve lost. 

“Well, well,” he says, holding up his King. “It’s just my lucky day.” 

You roll your eyes and wait. He leans over, clutching the card.

“Come to Piltover,” he says. “I’m not askin’ you to work with me and Malcolm. You won’t get caught up in anythin’, I swear. Just come with me.”

You lean back and take a second to let the fact that the only friend you’ve made in this city is someone who can’t even ask you for a favor like a normal person really sink in- and then quickly nod, because he’s getting antsy, and you feel anxious just watching him.

He breaks into a huge grin, like that was the very last thing he needed to settle. 

“Guess I’ve got my ride to Piltover,” he says smugly, and leans aside to dodge as you reach over to dunk his head under the water, taking your hand and lifting it to his lips to kiss, the perfect image of a gentleman. Or a scam artist. Why not both?

“What do you say we raise the stakes?” he coaxes. “One more game, double or nothin’.”

If you win, you’re going to kick him off the boat and sail in the opposite direction of Piltover. He agrees immediately, like he’s certain it’s not going to come to that, and spreads the cards out again. 

“Pick a card,” he says, and you don’t even hesitate. You pick a random card out and wait for the answering grin. He smiles at you, knowing he’s won again- and as he reaches for a card on the table, the one that his strange magic tells him is the winning card, you swap it with the one in your hand. 

You show your hands at the same time, and oh, his  _ face.  _ His face is  _ priceless.  _ He looks wildly between your card and his, completely stunned, mouth working like he’s trying to come up with some kind of explanation. 

“I win,” you say.

“What? I- you-  _ ugh,” _ he says, dropping his head into his hands with a groan. “Please don’t kick me off the boat.”

“What were you going to ask for?” you say, because if it’s something stupid, off he goes. 

He talks in circles and says things like  _ now, just hold on, _ and  _ I hadn’t thought of anythin’ yet, _ and you reach for a pole to shove him offboard.

"Wait, wait," he says, and sighs. "Was just gonna ask what it'd take for you to like me." 

Like him? What more proof does he need that you like him? You already let him put you in jail. You already agreed to follow him to his next godforsaken destination. You already agreed to give him a ride-

_ "Not that kind of ride," _ he says, and cuts himself off, grinning with just the very slightest edge of madness. "Well, goddamn. I'm usually better at this." 

"Just ask," you say, "like a normal person." 

"Can I kiss you?" he says, still grinning, looking like his brain has completely shut off. 

"Okay," you say, and oh, his  _ face.  _ Twice in one night. It really is your lucky day after all. You crawl over while his brain is still rebooting, and the first thing to go, tossed across the table, is that ridiculous hat. 

"It is not ridiculous," he says, snapping back into reality for this of all things, but you card your hand through his hair and he shuts up real quick. You tug on his long hair, lightly, enough to get him to tilt his head, and there we go. He kisses back almost immediately, smooth and practiced in the way you'd expect a man who's spent the last three decades of his life charming his way out of prison to be. 

"Maybe don't bring up prison right now," he says, licking into your mouth, sliding across the wooden bench to close the distance and run his hands over your back. He goes for a better angle, still moving closer, and when you pull back for breath you're already pressed against the edge of the seat. 

"Mind tellin' me how far you wanna go?" he says, mouthing at your neck. 

You take a moment to consider. He waits with commendable patience. Then you flip over, climbing on to straddle his legs. If you're going to do… whatever this is, you might as well commit. 

"I can do commitment," he says, with surprising sincerity. You wonder how long it's been since he got laid. 

"C'mon, now, I'm bein' serious here," he says, stroking his hands down your back and hooking his fingers into your waistband. You lift your hips so he can slide your clothes off, and when you reach over to return the favor you realize how many layers this man is wearing. Coat. Waistcoat. Chaps. Pants. Shirt. Undershirt. Maybe a corset under there, garters, stockings, you wouldn't be surprised. The sun might rise before you get everything off, seasons might change, the tides-

"You don't wanna be givin' me ideas about garters and stockings," he says, spreading your legs and sliding to his knees. You slap your hand over your mouth when he licks over, just goes right for it, and you're going to have probably the worst beard burn of your life after but it's fine. He flicks his tongue, sliding a finger inside, then two, working you open with such slow patience that you really start to wonder how insanely large he thinks his dick is. 

He looks up at you, rolling his eyes and pulling himself back to his feet with one last, soft bite at your inner thigh. “No complainin’ about my size, now.” 

You palm the straining bulge in his pants and he groans, jerking his hips involuntarily against your hand, then rushing to unzip. You wrap your hand around his erection, hot and smooth, and suppose the rest of his clothes can just stay on. You don’t have the patience or dexterity to get them off at this point, anyway. 

He leans over you, already in full seduction mode, eyes hooded, dark hair falling into his face. 

“Ready?” he says, grinning, voice low and intimate, and you reach across to flip him over instead, so that he’s the one stretched out on the bench, because it’s not really fair that he should be almost-fully-clothed  _ and  _ in charge.

He throws his head back, choking out “Fuck,” as you lower yourself down, all the way, until your thighs are flush against his hips, and honestly, yeah, fuck. It’s thick and hot and slick and good and you rock into it. His hands come up to grab at whatever he can, and you’re going to end up with finger-shaped bruises along with the beard burn, but again. Worth it. 

You set a slow, grinding rhythm, and he’s looking at you, grinning and still wearing far too many layers, but you can forgive him for it because he keeps tugging you down to kiss, and the grin is getting less seductive and more just...happy. 

It’s taking more effort than you thought to stay upright, but he just grips your waist, saying “I got this,” braces his legs against the bench, and thrusts up, tilting his hips  _ just right  _ and you know what, maybe he can be in charge after all. This man clearly knows what he’s doing. 

“Am I winnin’ you over yet?” he says, but you’ve got all your focus centered on how fucking good that feels and trying not to grip his hair so tight that it hurts and trying to breathe and keep your eyes open because he’s still looking at you, and  _ fuck fuck fuck  _ you’re coming, and he hauls himself up, supporting your weight as you shake through it. His hair is a mess and his grin has gone completely ridiculous, and honestly you prefer it this way. You wrap your arms around his shoulders and leave a full trail of bite marks down his neck, and he comes with a groan and a veritable stream of curses in your ear.

\---

“How’d you do it?” he asks, stretching out beside you. 

You shrug. He rolls over, resting his head in your lap with the misplaced confidence of someone who thinks he’s not still in danger of getting tossed into the water. 

“Aw, c’mon,” he says, playing little sleight-of-hand tricks with his cards while you watch. “I told you all of  _ my  _ secrets.” 

Yes, but that’s because he ran off and left you to sit in jail in his stead, and who knows when this clown’s going to do it again? 

“Never,” he declares, and “I’m a changed man,” and sure. When you see him prove it, maybe then you’ll tell him how you won his stupid card game. 

“Guess you’re gonna have to stick with me ‘till I do,” he says, grinning, reaching for your hand so he can press a kiss to it. You know it’s just a ruse to distract you from dumping him into the water, but you suppose you can humor him. For now. 

\---

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THANK YOU AGAIN FOR READING!! It's so nice to see you still reading this weird oneshot collection omg 😭🙏
> 
> There've been a few requests, so I'll be getting to oneshots for Yone, Swain, Singed (!!) and Shaco (!!!) whenever I can! Writing will probably slow down a lil bit asjfhdgjsg ive been going so hard on this league of legends fic of all things and for WHAT LMAO


	12. Zed

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There was a request/fic-trade for Zed! There's a little context and a lot of complaints in the end notes for anyone not familiar with this guy.
> 
> THANKS SO MUCH FOR READING, and feel free to leave reqs/comments!

You’re not sure where you are, but judging by the group of puzzled villagers surrounding you- a theme park? A renaissance fair? 

No, say the villagers, this is a real village, and also they don’t have any idea what a theme park is. They’re lovely people, very accommodating, but it takes you the better part of the day to convince yourself that you haven’t gone entirely insane. 

\---

You spend the next few days trying to accept the fact that no one here knows how to get you back home. This place (this world? This universe?) is hundreds of years behind your own in terms of general advancement. Electricity? They read by candlelight. Running water? They get their water from the nearest well. Medicine? _They pray, imploring the Spirits to save them from even the most basic of diseases._

The next time one of them comes down with food poisoning and starts babbling about evil spirits, you march right over to their house to lecture them about the importance of cleanliness and hygiene and proper cooking practices.

“Look,” you say, taking their hand and dunking it into the soapy water.

The hand glows. The villager stares at you, open-mouthed. You look away and continue talking, purposefully ignoring its bright blue light- at least long enough for you to finish your demonstration.

\---

The stomachache is cured- sorry, _purified-_ immediately. You are hailed as a mage unprecedented in their healing prowess. Your lecture on cleanliness goes completely unheeded. 

\---

More experimentation (suddenly, you’re the village’s brand-new, dedicated healer) reveals that you can only purify. You can cure diseases, infections, close open wounds, but you can’t re-grow missing limbs or missing organs or anything that’s already out of the body. 

Even this is enough to get you bombarded with requests for your services, and soon enough other villages are asking for your help, and then towns, and before you know it you’re rushing around, travelling sometimes for hours on end to reach the settlement that needs help. 

At the very least, it’s a good living. And you get to lecture every new patient about basic healthcare, even if they only listen to humor you. 

\---

You’ve lived like this for a few months now, and you’re just starting to get used to it, maybe even enjoy it, which means that it’s about time for something to ruin everything. 

“Come with me,” says the stranger in the black robes, standing over your bed at an ungodly hour of the night.

“Come back in the morning,” you say, rolling over and pulling the covers up over your face.

As you’d expect, that doesn’t work. Instead, they very physically lift you out of your warm, comfortable bed, carrying you instead to a nondescript wagon. They’re very apologetic. But they don’t take no for an answer.

\---

The man they bring you to, after three straight hours of the most uncomfortable wagon-ride you have ever had the misfortune to experience, looks like he’s on the verge of death.

“Hurry,” the robed people urge, hovering around and peering at you as you study what you’re only half-sure is still a living person. You’re not sure if you can replenish lost blood, or stitch- oh god- vital organs closed, but they brought you all this way. You’ll at least give it a shot.

It takes more time, effort and concentration than you thought you had in you, but by the time it’s done, he’s at least breathing. Probably. Maybe. A little hard to tell with that full-face mask. The robed people are beside themselves, gathering around him, carting him off, and one of them stays behind to offer you a place to sleep for the day. 

You blink, and look around, and...it’s day. You spent so long healing him that the sun’s not only risen, it’s high in the sky by now. Yes. You might just take them up on their offer. 

\---

You sleep the entire day, and when you wake up, it’s already nightfall. You should probably get a map, or ask them to take you back to the vill-

 _“Come back in the morning,”_ you say. The robed person standing over your bed looks, at the very least, apologetic. 

“We have others in need of healing,” they say sheepishly, and you roll yourself out of bed to go help.

\---

They do take you back to your village after that, but this pattern repeats itself with frustrating regularity. You’ll live your normal, peaceful life, and once every few weeks, someone in a black robe will show up at ungodly hours of the night asking for your help.

“Why?” you say. “Why can it not wait until after sunrise?”

“The Order of the Shadows does its work whenever it is needed,” they say stubbornly, and you’re tempted to tell the order just where it can shove its shadowy self- but it doesn’t change the fact that people need healing, and so far you’re the only healer around, and so you drag yourself out of bed every single time.

\---

They bring you to their weird, overgrown temple every time, but this time seems different. They have the same nervous energy they had the very first time they contacted you, and when you get out of the wagon you realize why. Apparently he lived through all those grievous wounds. You may be a better healer than you thought.

“Ionia thanks you for your help,” says the tall, masked man, bowing.

“No problem, Ionia,” you say, bowing back, even though you have no idea why he’s referring to himself in the third person. Maybe he’s, like, the queen, or something.

\---

“So,” he says, uncertainly.

“I’m just travelling,” you say. “I’m not from here,” because yes, _of course_ you knew Ionia was the name of the country, why would you not know? It’s not like you’ve been living in purposeful ignorance for the last half a year, trying to convince yourself you’re still in some remote part of your own world-

“I am Zed, the Master of the Order,” he says, politely choosing to ignore the edge of hysteria in your expression, just like you politely choose to ignore the fact that his self-proclaimed job title is _Master of the Order._ “Can the Order of the Shadows count on your continued assistance?”

Eh. As long as you don’t have to initiate yourself into their cult. 

He draws himself up. “The Order of the Shadows is _not_ a-”

“Your members keep talking about the forbidden arts,” you say.

“Our techniques allow us to harness the power of-”

“You live in a giant temple in the middle of the forest,” you say. 

“It is a _storied_ building of the _greatest_ impor-”

“You call yourselves the Order of the Shadow,” you say.

He drops his head into his hands and sits there for a long, long time. You wait, happy to allow him however long he needs for self-reflection.

\---

Cultural differences and lifestyle choices aside, you have no problem helping out with any healing needs. It’s the same as any other village, honestly, even if this particular village chooses to sequester themselves away in an ancient temple and wear nothing but grim-looking sets of armor and robes and talk endlessly about the dark arts. 

“Must you phrase it in such a way?” he says. “I would not have.”

Of course he wouldn’t. He’s the Master of the Order. 

\---

The more you visit the cult (sorry, the _Order),_ the more often you see him. Being the leader means he’s always out on some mission or other, and more missions mean more injuries. 

“I apologize,” he says, voice unchanging even though you can literally see the gaping wounds on his body. “I did not mean to take up so much of your time.”

You smile in what you hope is a friendly, professional manner, ignore your gag reflex, and get to healing. 

\---

Once in a while, you see him after the end of your work, and he always makes at least a little time to speak to you. You can just _feel_ the jealous eyes of everyone else in the nearby vicinity on you. “Not a cult”, your ass.

You don’t want to talk about your previous life, and so instead you ask him about his. He’s initially reticent, reluctant to speak about himself, but you remind him that if you wanted any harm to come to him and his little group of cultists, you could just have _not healed them._

“Once again,” he says, “We are _not_ cultists,” but he seems to relax a little after that. Every conversation leaves you with some new piece of information- how the Order is apparently fighting back invaders, stories of a long-standing war, the rather drastic techniques they use to channel their dark arts- and once in a while, bits of his own story, about the nightmares he still has, about the kind of suffering using this type of power puts him through, about the apprentice whose ambitions have taken him across the ocean, about the brother who he will never be able to look in the eye again. 

"What I have done cannot be undone," he says, and once you finish rolling your eyes, you pat him on the shoulder. 

"I'll be here to help you with all the stupid things you're going to do in the future," you say, and even though he glares and makes biting remarks about how what he's doing is _necessary_ and _the right path_ and _not at all stupid,_ he doesn't make even one move to leave. 

\---

Fixing him up always takes hours, probably due to the extent of his wounds, but he never complains, never flinches, never does anything except wait in silence for you to finish your work.

“Doesn’t it hurt?” you say.

“It does not hurt when I am with you,” he says, and you don’t really know what to make of that.

\---

"Letter for you," says the village merchant, passing you a neat, nondescript envelope. You rip it open, reading it as quickly as you can in the fading evening light. 

Huh. You're not sure where the Kinkou Order is, or what they are, but if they require a healer you don't see anyone else around who can do the job. It's a pain, but you toss a travel bag together and prepare to leave in the morning. 

\---

You're woken up in the middle of the night by a horribly familiar feeling. 

_"You cannot go,"_ he says, agitated, his mask glinting in the moonlight, gripping your shoulder so tightly it hurts. 

"Please," you say. "Please can you just come back in the morning." 

"Their order will want you to stay when they see what you can do," he says, and he doesn't have to continue. You can hear the _and what if you decide to stay?_ in his voice. 

"I'll come back," you say, trying to end the conversation and get what little sleep you can before dawn, but he's not deterred. 

"You are not from my Order. You are not even from Ionia. I cannot tell you what to do," he says, almost talking to himself, saying it like it's something he's not used to. "Will you return? I don't know, and I cannot ask you to-" 

"I will come back," you say, gripping the hand on your shoulder with equally desperate fervor, "So _please let me sleep."_

When you look up again, he's disappeared, and you yank the covers back over your head and close your eyes. 

\---

You do go to the temple, even though it's a few weeks' journey away, because they need help. It takes another few weeks to finish your work, but at least this temple is bright, and airy, and the people inside it don't wander around mumbling ominously about shadow magic and forbidden arts. 

"Are you sure you will not stay?" says their leader, when it's time for you to leave. "We could use your help." 

"I have a long-term commitment," you say, and he nods and doesn't ask again, which honestly is far more civil than sneaking into someone's home in the middle of the night, and maybe he could learn something from this guy, but you digress. You did promise to go back. 

\---

The people in black robes converge on you the moment you step through your front door, and you're too shocked to protest, because they actually turned up in the daytime. 

They do the whole song and dance- _healer, we need healing, come with us to our super secret black magic temple-_ but when they usher you into the sick bay (or the room you forcefully took from them and christened the sick bay), the person waiting inside doesn't look sick at all. 

"You came back," he says, striding over to you, and who the fuck is this, wasting your time and dragging you all the way here when he's not even injured? 

Silence. He frowns. Then he raises a hand, hovering over his face, and rushes to grab his headgear. 

"Hello, Master of the Order," you say, as he fumbles with the straps. 

"You came back," he says again, still fumbling, and you just reach over and pluck the helmet off, because why does he even bother wearing that at home? 

"I thought perhaps- you might have decided not to return," he says, surrendering his mask in favor of looking at you like he's trying to sear your face into his memory. Jesus. It's only been, like, two months. 

"I said I'd come back," you say, and even though it's already a shock to see his face, it's a different thing altogether to see him smile. 

  
  
\---

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> @Amsterdam_Bserk requested a male reader, so it's reader-kun instead of reader-chan this time! 
> 
> CONTEXT:  
> Zed is a very nationalist shadow ninja (I ❤️ Ionia) whose Order tattoos black magic onto their bodies to enhance their powers! He's very into using whatever means at his disposal to protect his country, even if he has to crush his fellow countrymen to do it, which honestly is kind of odd but hey you do you ninja buddy
> 
> COMPLAINTS:  
> I was reading up on Zed to write this request, and the official name of his Order is "Yanléi", which apparently means the "Tears of the Shadow" in the local language, and you can tell that this part was written by someone with google translate at their disposal because 眼泪 (yǎn lèi, they didn't even get the accent right) LITERALLY MEANS JUST TEARS. I went to check the Chinese league of legends website to see if they actually went along with this clownery and they fucking ignored it and renamed it 影之泪, Tears of the Shadow, because they know that calling your ninja clan YANLEI is LITERALLY LIKE CALLING YOUR NINJA CLAN 👁💧👄💧👁 THANKS FOR COMING TO MY TED TALK


	13. Yone

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There was a request for Yone! There's some context at the bottom for readers who aren't familiar with this guy : D. Riot really loves them some masked dudes huh
> 
> As usual, thank you SO MUCH for reading!! Requests are open and drabble requests are even more open!

"Are you alright?" says the old man, and you look up to reply- but all you do is scream, because the mask he's wearing is terrifying. 

\---

He helps you up from where you’ve fallen (screaming) to the ground and skinned your knee, moving you over to the bench outside his house to sit you down and patch you up and bring you tea, and is generally just the kindliest person in the world, but you cannot look him in the face. The mask moves, no, of course it doesn't move, that's ridiculous, but you see it. It  _ pulses. _ It feels alive. And it looks like the most malevolent thing you've ever seen. 

You ask him if he could please take off the mask, and he looks at you (probably. You still can't see his eyes). 

"What mask?" he says. 

\---

It takes you a little while to stop hyperventilating. The tea helps. 

He sits back down beside you when you’ve regulated your breathing, insisting that he doesn’t have a mask and also that you should let him bring you to the town healer. 

“You have a mask,” you say, “It’s right there,” and when you reach up to take it off, it screams. It shrieks, leaping off the man’s face and onto your own, and you can’t see a thing. It’s pitch black, and the screaming just keeps going, ringing in your ears, but just as quickly as it happened - it stops. The screaming fades, smaller and smaller until it’s a barely-noticeable buzz in the back of your head, and when you slap your hands to your face, the mask is...gone. You can see again. 

The old man (whose face you can suddenly see) blinks at you, shocked, and for some reason the first thing he does is drag you into his home for more tea. 

You spend the next hour listening to him talk about how stressed he’s been lately, and how tired, and how suddenly, so suddenly, he feels  _ so much better,  _ and maybe it was fate that he met you after all?

He sends you on your way with a cheerful wave and a bag of...what seems to be the local currency. 

You stumble away, tripping over the road, and when you fall, you realize that even though you’ve scraped your leg again, it doesn’t hurt. Not even a little bit. 

\---

As you wander around the town you see masks. Masks everywhere. Not everyone has one, maybe only one in a hundred people, but someone with something that terrifying on their face stands out. When you go up to them and ask them about it, none of them have any idea what you’re talking about- but when you take the mask off, they change. It depends on the person- some rush off; calling for their spouse or child, some start crying, some just stand there, shell-shocked. But all of them leave looking better than they had before- and usually only after shoving something valuable into your hands.

You may have a way to go home- but at least you have money, and maybe a way to make more, and really, isn't that what life is all about? 

\---

After weeks and weeks of wandering around, playing pretend therapist to masked people in any town you happen to visit, you still aren’t really sure what the masks do. They don’t actually do anything. You can’t summon them or wear them or manifest them, and you can’t make them do things - they just kind of do what they want when they get a chance. If you fall, they’ll dull your senses so you don’t feel pain. If you’re trying to stay awake, they’ll sharpen your mind and feed you adrenaline. The more you collect, the stronger the effect, and you’ve been collecting a  _ lot.  _

They’re probably trying to protect their host, but maybe it’s best you don’t think too hard about that part. Anyway, better you than the people they were leeching off of before, and it’s not like you don’t get paid for your troubles. 

“Thank you,” says the latest unmasked person, passing you a small pouch of coins. No, thank  _ you.  _

\---

The masked man turns up one night without warning, blocking your path on the quiet, lonely road. You can tell that he’s different, not only because of the odd half-mask he’s wearing, and not only because he’s also got his own collection of masks hanging around his waist, but because the first thing he does is draw his swords and point them straight at you.

“You,” he says, and his voice has the same odd ring to it that you hear when the masks scream. “You wear _ so many.” _

The man closes his eyes, murmuring something, and you barely have time to dodge the two swords that are suddenly so, so close to your heart. You recoil in horror, because what’s attacking you isn’t the man, but a ghost, a weird, pale copy of him, tethered to his sword. How many masks do you have to collect before you can make your own ghost? 

“It is not me you should fear,” says the man, and you stare at him, because unless there’s someone else trying to bust you open like a pinata, it’s _ absolutely him _ you should fear. You don’t have time to tell him that, though, because he’s already closed his eyes and started muttering yet another spell, and you’re not sticking around to find out if it’s as slice-and-dicey as the previous one. The masks swirl, or do whatever it is that they do, and you find yourself shrouded in fog. 

The man cries out and lunges forward, swords still drawn, but you’re already out of range and running for the nearest town. 

\---

He’s relentless. 

Whichever town you go to, whichever city you end up in, he follows, his swords drawn and his ghastly collection of masks still swinging from his belt. At least  _ you  _ have the decency to absorb them, instead of prancing around with creepy masks jingling from your waist like some kind of degenerate. 

He attacks without warning, always at night, and always when no one else is around, which is why you end up spending the nights in bars and taverns and sleeping the day away instead. You keep collecting masks, now with an added sense of urgency, and the more you collect, the more fervent he is in his attempts to gut you like a fish.

“Why?!” you say, leaping back again, as the masks rush to shroud you in fog. 

“Consider yourself fortunate,” he says, rushing towards you with inhuman speed, “That the Akazana have not yet devoured you.”

That was hands-down the worst answer to “why” you have ever heard. What the fuck is that? What the fuck is he? What the fuck is your life right now? 

It becomes something of a routine. A hellish routine, sure, but even someone as ignorant of the ways of this world as you are knows that if you ever break this routine or let your guard down in any way, there’s not going to be one, but two swords stabbing you right through the chest. 

You run. He follows. You keep running. He chases you down with single-minded determination. You scream questions, and he replies with answers that make you consider if you’re actually in a hospital coma, hallucinating this entire experience. 

Again, it’s a horrible routine. And again, it’s better than being run through with swords. So you stick to it. 

\---

One night, you stay out drinking just a little too late, and by the time you start heading back to your inn, hardly anyone else is around. 

You know what’s coming, but you’re still allowed to wish it wouldn’t. You don’t even want to turn around, but the pressure from behind is larger and more horrific than even all the times before. You spin around, about to tell him to just let it go already, but the words barely have time to leave your mouth before they’re turned into a garbled scream. 

“It’s following me,” says the woman, reaching out to you, her face a rictus of horror. “It’s following me.”

You know, because you can see it, and it is the first time you really regret being able to see these things at all. It twists and stretches, clawing its way towards the woman with jerking movements. You really, really wish you could close your eyes, but it feels like you forgot how. 

The thing is almost there, can reach out its warped, fleshy hand and touch its prey, when there’s a flash of silver so bright you flinch and look away, but finally,  _ finally  _ that guy’s here, and he and his two swords can finally put themselves to good use. You look back, fully expecting the monster to be already dispatched, and instead what you see is the blade of the sword, fully embedded in the woman’s chest.

You were a fool for ever thinking this man had even the smallest fragment of sanity. 

“My blade sees your true name,” he says, and  _ oh my god he’s insane.  _ Maybe it was a good thing he was chasing you, because who knows how many innocent people he would have straight up murdered by now-

The woman blinks. The sword slides out, leaving no trace that it was ever there. Nothing at all, except for the fact that the thing chasing her is now screaming. 

The man doesn't take a single step, but his ghost projection is more than enough to do the work for him. The creature screams again as the blades impale themselves into its body, shriveling into nothingness, obscured by a thick, sudden fog. 

You stare and stare, and when the fog finally clears, there's nothing left where it was but a wooden mask. 

You feel slightly sick. 

\---

The woman leaves, looking freshly traumatized (for obvious reasons), and the two of you… kind of just stand there. 

He picks up his sword. You back away to a safe distance. 

"I am trying to help you," he says, sounding not the least bit helpful at all, but then he did kill that thing, so. "The blade does not hurt that which is not Akazana." 

It's been a long day. It's almost comforting to hear him go back to his normal gibberish. You think about the twisting, crawling creature, and if that's what Akazana is, you don't want any part of it. Maybe his whole sword thing is a ritual. Like a ghost sword. Maybe it won't hurt you. It didn't hurt that woman, right? And if this succeeds, or if he at least thinks he succeeded, he'll finally fuck off and leave you alone, right? 

"Okay," you say. "Stab me." 

He pauses, sword only half-raised. Clearly he wasn't expecting that. 

You walk closer, waving an arm at your chest. "Right here. Stab. Stab now." 

He raises his sword. "Are you prepared?" 

_ No, you're not prepared, _ but it's either this or have him chase you for the rest of your life,  _ right, _ so you grab him by the weird bandages around his neck before you can psyche yourself out, saying  _ hurry up, hurry up, just fucking stab me- _

There's a pause, and a cold, cold feeling, and you realize that you're close enough to see his face past the mask he always wears. His expression looks… strange, not calm like you'd expected, and the hand that's holding you still is tense and shaking, and when you look down you realize why. The blade slides back out, dripping with blood, and the masks scream. 

The last thing you remember before passing out is being very, very glad that they're still able to numb your pain receptors. 

\---

When you wake up, it’s still the middle of the night- you can tell because the masked man is still here, and you’ve never seen him at any other time. Maybe he just disintegrates in sunlight. 

You can still feel the masks buzzing, faintly, inside you, and you know he failed. You might not be dead, but it doesn’t mean you’re not pissed. You point at him accusingly, and he at least has the good grace to look uncomfortable. Maybe. Again, hard to tell with that mask. 

“Explain,” you say, and he does. Kind of. It’s a struggle to understand him through his weird, old-fashioned speech, and he keeps using terms that literally no one but him is familiar with, but eventually you get the gist. The masks attach themselves to people, feeding off negative emotions, and eventually grow into monsters called Akazana, which this guy tracks down and kills. 

He nods, gesturing at his horrific collection of masks. “All those that I have defeated,” he says, and sure, that’s great, good for him, collecting shrunken faces like McDonalds toys, but you take masks from people  _ before  _ they even get a chance to grow up into big strong monsters, so doesn’t that make  _ you  _ the stronger one-

“I do not  _ absorb  _ the masks,” he snaps, and okay, he’s got a point. “Does that not concern you?”

No, you were too busy being concerned with getting double-stabbed, and when you actually agreed to it, look how it turned out. 

“I will not attempt it again,” he says begrudgingly. Wow.  _ Thanks.  _

He shakes his head when you ask him if he’ll leave. “Who knows what the Akazana will try to do? I cannot leave so many unchecked.”

You take a moment to consider if you should be insulted that he thinks you’re going to evolve into some kind of mega-zana, and while you do that he gathers his swords and settles himself into the chair beside the bed.

“Sleep,” he says. “I will protect you.”

Protect you from  _ what- _ oh. In case you evolve into the Godzilla of Akazanas. Fantastic. Not insulting at all-

_ “Sleep,” _ he says again, crossing his arms and leaning back. It’s clear you’re not going anywhere without him following you, and at least if you agree to this he won’t materialize out of the darkness and try to stab you again. Probably.

“Fine,” you say, rolling over and pulling the covers up over your head so you don’t have to see him and his fifteen creepy masks staring at you.

\---

When you wake up, he’s still there, and unfortunately you can’t pretend it was all just a bad dream. 

“I said I would protect you,” he says, sounding like he will do nothing of the sort- but he walks over, fussing over the bandages, and leaves his swords firmly in their sheaths, and maybe you can deal with this strange arrangement for a little while more. 

\---

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CONTEXT: Yone is a man who came back from the spirit realm by defeating an Akazana and wearing its mask! He uses two mismatched swords and travels the country to rid it of demons. 
> 
> FUN FACTS ABOUT YONE:
> 
> \- All Akazana masks are full-faced, very Noh/Chinese Opera-style things, but how come the Akazana mask that he wears is like a freaking thong version of a mask to show off his handsome face?? Huh?? God damn persona-5-lookin mf
> 
> \- His official side story has him straight up shanking a kid with no explanation besides IT IS NOT ME YOU SHOULD FEAR and tbh im here for it
> 
> \---
> 
> Akazana apparently feed off negative traits, and in my headcanon not only is reader not from this universe anyway, her stupidity is so vast that no mask in the world can contain it (they're trying tho they're really trying)
> 
> Also I thought it'd just be super great to have the reader just be like STAB ME, CMON DO IT BRO, FUCKIN STAB ME and him just absolutely going for it, really living that "last two brain cells" life


	14. Kayn

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A trade with @mirrordaltokki (Thank you so much for trading with me)
> 
> The reader is a little different this time because it's supposed to be a self-insert as part of the trade saghjkshdgks, I hope it's still entertaining, and as usual, thank you so much if you're reading this OMGGGG
> 
> Some context for Kayn is in the end notes if you're not familiar with this character!

This isn’t one of the best dreams you’ve had. 

You try not to focus on the carnage unfolding before your unfortunate eyes, but this dream is good quality. High-definition. The blood  _ glistens.  _ You think about all those times you wished you could fully experience those games you play in all their savage glory and take a second to really, truly regret it. 

The people around you scream and swing their shoddy weapons and cut each other down, and you decide to just walk away. Sure, it looks like the entire area as far as you can see is still locked in combat, but if you walk far enough and long enough you will inevitably reach a place that’s not dripping in gore. Or you will just wake up. Either way works. 

You shake your head, turn to leave, and walk straight into the sharp end of a sword.

The man wielding it looks completely stunned, because his sword goes right through you like he’s stabbing at thin air, but of course it does. You’re dreaming. You’re not sure why your own brain cannot comprehend that, but just like its owner, your brain cannot comprehend a lot of things, so it’s better not to question it.

\---

Among the carnage, a person who isn’t wielding a weapon goes somewhat unnoticed when there are other, far more dangerous people to deal with. You walk and walk and walk, and after a while the sounds of battle start to taper off, the shouting and clashing of metal against metal growing fainter and fainter until you can hardly hear it anymore, and it’s only when you reach the second field of fallen bodies that you realize why. The fight over here is almost over. 

A few stragglers remain, still intent on either defending their land or invading it. They’ve gathered, forming a loose group around some type of small animal-

The kid screams, swinging his sickle around like a pint-sized lunatic. Even your own mind-hallucinations can’t make children tolerable. 

No matter how insufferable they are, you still don’t want to see a kid get hacked to pieces before your very eyes, so you have to do something. You rush up, phase right through the bodies of the men and plant yourself in front of the kid, and that’s enough to shock them into stillness for a second, which should be more than enough time for him to beat a hasty retr-

He screams again, leaping through you and planting his sickle right into the chest of the nearest man. Children are truly the worst things nature has ever given us. 

\---

The kid dispatches the three grown men in what has to be record time. You just watch, because this is partly your fault, and you’re starting to wonder if you sided with the wrong person here. Then he turns and goes straight for you, and you don’t need to wonder, you  _ know. _

He shouts, swinging his makeshift weapon through you again and again like he’s trying to force it to connect with sheer willpower alone. You just stand there and wait for the little fucker to tire himself out. 

It takes far, far longer than you expected, but finally he collapses onto the muddy ground, so exhausted he can’t even lift his weapon anymore. 

“I am not afraid of you, spirit!” he says, still face-down in the dirt. Tragic. You pat his shoulder, but your hand just goes straight through. 

\---

It takes a little while longer for him to stop yelling threats at you, but once he’s finally out of steam he just stops, resting his head on his arms and glaring sullenly at you like it’s your fault his crappy sickle can’t cut through ghosts. 

He honestly looks like he’s about to pass out, so you get up to go look for anything useful. It’s a little less horrifying when the people are already dead, so you manage to look over most of the bodies without freaking out, and what do you know- there are benefits to being first on the field, and no one’s been here to raid the corpses yet. 

You point to the corpse with the first aid supplies. The kid stares at you. You point harder. 

He staggers to his feet and drags himself over to where you are and does a surprisingly good job of fixing himself up, for a kid. You remember why the U.N. passed that resolution condemning child soldiers. 

You lead him around to whatever looks useful, and he picks up coins, more bandages, and whatever armor can fit someone who’s a third of the size of a regular adult. 

“Do you ever speak?” he says, glaring, but he follows you wherever you point, so speaking isn’t really necessary, is it? You’re kind of getting into the whole ghost roleplay at this point.

By the time the two of you are done, it’s almost nightfall, and you’ve already spent the entire day looting corpses, and you try not to feel too worried, because shouldn’t you have woken up by now? Are you supposed to go to sleep? Can you sleep in dreams? What if you’re actually dead, or even worse, if this joke of a dream is the last thing your dying brain chose to conjure up before you fall face-first into whatever afterlife awaits someone who goes around looting hypothetical corpses-

“What is wrong with your face?” the kid asks, squinting at you, and honestly, you’re probably already dead, because this feels a lot like hell. 

\---

It turns out that you don’t need sleep. 

Instead, you point and point until the kid gets the message, curling himself up in the small cave you found at the foot of a nearby hill, and then you walk. 

Purgatory has no lights, no electricity, and no people. It’s quiet, the villages nearby all abandoned or destroyed by that day’s battles, but it happened so fast that the food and supplies haven’t been taken yet.  _ You  _ may not need to eat, but you know someone who does. 

He jerks awake when you sit yourself down next to him, but when he sees it’s you, he rolls back over and goes straight back to sleep. Turns out he was telling the truth when he said he didn’t fear spirits. 

\---

You spend the next couple of days leading him around. Food. Water. Clothes. Supplies. No other people to speak of, or speak to, but you suppose if you walk far enough, you’ll come to a town that hasn’t yet been raided. 

“The empire will have burned everything by now,” he says, shrugging, and you try not to think about what that means for your hopes of finding civilization. 

He asks a lot of questions for a kid whose first reaction was to try and slice you up into little bitty pieces. Who are you? How did you die? Did you die here? Is your corpse still on the battlefield? Do you want to go back and bury yourself? 

Honestly, it’s a little rude to assume you’re already dead, but whatever. You just shrug, and he glares at you, and asks another question, and the cycle repeats. After a while, he stops asking questions and starts talking instead, holding a one-sided conversation about everything. He likes this food. Not so much that food. The well here is almost dry, we (we?) should move on. This village is poorly made. It is hard to defend. Noxia will-

_ “Noxia,” _ you say, and his eyes widen to an almost comical degree, but you are too busy having your own little mental breakdown to notice. 

\---

“Say something again,” he demands, trying to shake your shoulder, but as usual his hand just swipes right through, and you are still distracted trying to process whatever the hell is going on here.

You try praying. You will go to church this week. You will get your shit together. You will uninstall this god-forsaken game from every device you own. You will live a good life, a life free from whatever poor decisions have led you to this horrific fever dream-

The kid  _ lunges, _ throwing his whole body at you, passing right through and landing with a  _ thud  _ on the ground. “What’s wrong? Answer me! Hey!”

“What’s your name,” you say, and when he answers you wonder how it is that you didn’t notice the blue hair and make the connection in the first place. 

\---

You make him go back to the battlefield.

“Why?!” he demands, glaring and shaking his sickle, but he follows you nonetheless. You don’t tell him why, because “I need to go find your adoptive father and make sure he sees you and that I didn’t screw up your entire life by bringing you on a quaint village tour” just doesn’t seem like the right thing to say to a kid. 

You try to sit him down, smack in the center, surrounded by corpses, and clearly he likes it just as little as you do, but you point and point until he finally stomps over.

He leaps to his feet when you run into the forest, but you point and say “Wait for me,” and he reluctantly sits back down on the ground. 

You run and run, and your footsteps make no sound, which normally would be fantastic, but you’re trying to attract attention. You’re trying to find the kid a surrogate parent. You’re not going to be able to find ninjas. Ninjas will have to find you.

You stop, stand right in the middle of the clearing, and start screaming. 

\---

It does not, in fact, take very long for the ninja to find you, perhaps because you keep screaming  _ the Noxians are coming, the Noxians are coming, help help help, wow if only shadow ninjas were here to help us- _

“Hm. A shadow that speaks,” he says, and suddenly a blade is being held at your throat. You walk straight through it and start pointing. 

\---

It takes an obscene amount of time to get him to follow you, because he’s more interested in trying to kill you than have a conversation, but his weapons just fly straight through you, and you wave and throw your arms around and jab at the air until he finally gives up and goes along, even if only out of pure curiosity. 

You stop at the edge of the forest and point to where the little kid is still sitting, all alone and clutching his sickle, and for once the man following you goes where you want him to without being asked. 

You wait and watch as they have what looks to be the most standoffish conversation known to man, and for a horrible second you worry that everything’s gone wrong and the kid is going to try and take on a grown man armed with nothing but a sickle, but suddenly the ninja stretches out his hand. After a long, long pause, the kid takes it, and you try not to weep with relief. 

They make to leave, but suddenly he’s craning his neck around and looking for- is he looking for you? He swivels his head around, peering, and then he’s running towards the edge of trees where he last saw you, and you realize it’s your fault, because you told him to wait for you.

He waves when he sees you walk out of the forest, but you just point at the ninja (who’s waiting with remarkable patience) and make shoo-ing movements, and he pauses. Looks back. Looks at you again. You point harder.

He opens his mouth to say something, but suddenly all you can hear is a ringing, so loud and piercing that you have to clutch your head to try and block it out, and he’s dropped his sickle and started running, and you only have a split second to wonder if ghosts can die again before you wake up. 

\---

You uninstall the god-forsaken game from every device you own, and your life is better for it. 

\---

Months pass, and you’re almost able to forget about that dream, and you’ve just about gotten over the fear that you’re going to fall asleep one day and Inception yourself back into a lifetime of ghost LARPing with no escape. You’ve uninstalled the game. You’ve made good with life. Your karma should hold up. You will have nothing but restful slumber for the rest of your nights-

You open your eyes, look around, and immediately close them again. 

“A familiar shadow,” says the ninja, and his face might be obscured with his ridiculous new helmet, but you already know who it is. You roll over and slam your face into the grass. Maybe head trauma will wake you up. 

He taps you on the shoulder, and the both of you freeze, because  _ he could tap you on the shoulder.  _ He leans down, thankfully not to hold a knife to your throat again, and clearly intent on starting a conversation-

A distant shout, and the sound of running footsteps, and you barely manage to roll out of the way before the kid, who is apparently no longer a kid,  _ lunges _ at the spot where you just were. 

“It’s you,” he says, and you look at the dent in the ground where you would have been just a second ago, and reconsider what you were thinking about head trauma.

  
  


\---

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CONTEXT:
> 
> Kayn is an ex-child soldier who got conscripted basically as battle fodder! He was discovered after his very first battle by Zed, who took him into his super sekrit dark magic ninja clan. Now he spends his time sneaking around assassinating people and talking about shadows a lot! Also has dreams of taking over the dark ninja clan in Zed's place. Probably needs to curb that ego lmao
> 
> \---
> 
> WHEW THAT WAS FUN! This self-insert appears in my league drabbles a lot, THANK YOU FOR INDULGING ME IN MY STUPIDITY SGDJKGD


End file.
